Bethesda, Md. — An actor in the movie "Kandahar" is also an assassin who killed an Iranian dissident in suburban Washington in 1980 and then fled to Iran, a prosecutor says.
Hassan Tantai, who plays a black American doctor in the film, is actually 51-year-old Daoud Salahuddin, born David Belfield, said Montgomery County State's Atty. Douglas Gansler.
Hassan Tantai, who plays a black American doctor, is shown in a scene from Avatar Films' new release "Kandahar," which was filmed in Iran. Prosecutors say Tantai is also an assassin who killed an Iranian dissident in suburban Washington in 1980 and then fled to Iran.
"We are very confident that they are one in the same," Gansler said. "He's a terrorist, he's a fugitive and he's a confessed assassin."
"Kandahar" has been shown at film festivals worldwide and won two awards at the prestigious Cannes festival. With its suddenly timely theme of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, it opened in New York theaters on Dec. 14 and made its debut in the rest of the country Friday.
Directed by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and filmed in the Iranian town of Niatak, near the Afghan border, "Kandahar" is the story of an Afghan journalist living in Canada who travels to Afghanistan to find her sister. She must cover herself with a burqa and pretend to be an Afghan wife for the trip into the fundamentalist, Taliban-ruled society.
Along the way she meets Tantai, playing the role of an American-born doctor treating Afghan women. He wears a fake beard to satisfy strict Taliban rules, a prop that he eventually takes off to show his full face.
Gansler said he has "conclusive" information that proves Tantai is actually Salahuddin, but won't comment further because the case is still technically open. There is no statute of limitations on first-degree murder cases, he said.
Makhmalbaf said he chooses his actors from "crowded streets and barren deserts"' and does not know if Salahuddin and Tantai are the same person.
"I never ask those who act in my films what they have done before, nor do I follow what they do after I finish shooting my film. 'Kandahar' is no exception," he said in a statement.
Prosecutors say Salahuddin, who had converted to Islam as a young man, pulled up to former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai's home in July 1980 in a postal truck that he borrowed by bribing a friend. He wore a mailman's outfit to get past tight security at the home and hid a gun inside a package.
When Tabatabai came to the door, Salahuddin fired off three shots and then fled, officials said. Tabatabai died later that day while Salahuddin escaped to Iran and shelter under the regime of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Tabatabai, the former spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Washington, was an opponent of Khomeini.
In a 1995 interview with The Washington Post and ABC News in Turkey, Salahuddin said he was contacted by the Iranian agents shortly after Khomeini's Islamic revolution toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, and asked if he would kill Tabatabai. He agreed in return for $4,000 and a promise he would be sent to China for medical training.
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