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Iran assassination plot: Four attacks that have been blamed on Iran

For years, US officials have described Iran as the “most active” state sponsor of terror in the world. Many have been carried out by proxy forces, such as Lebanese Hezbollah, which was created by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in 1982, so the exact nature of the role of the Islamic Republic, if any, often remains uncertain. Here’s a list of major terror attacks blamed on Iran in the past four decades.

1. US Embassy in Tehran, 1979

AP/File
One of the American hostages-his hands bound blindfolded-is displayed to the crowd outside the American embassy in Tehran, Nov. 9, 1979. Some of the militant Iranian students who seized the embassy in the Iranian capital flank the hostage.

  • By Ariel Zirulnick Staff writer
  • Scott Peterson Staff writer

Within months of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, militant students seized the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

This act, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini praised as a “second revolution, greater than the first,” set in train a three decades of mutual hostility between the US and Iran.

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