May 20, 2022
Iran has imported another American cultural standard that no one wants workplace rage with a disgruntled employee shooting his office mates.
The first such case was recorded May 18 in Ilam in far western Iran where an employee of the Mostazafin Foundation returned to the office with a Kalashnikov rifle and two grenades. He took a number of staffers hostage. At some point he began shooting and tossed at least one of the grenades.
He killed six of his former colleagues, including at least two women, before turning the gun on himself. Several others were wounded, some seriously.
A local official said one of the men killed was a cousin of the assailant, who has not yet been named.
The assailant killed himself when police arrived at the scene and began closing in.
Such workplace shootings first erupted in US post offices in 1986, and the killings are known in American English as “going postal.” While mass shootings are not unknown in Iran, they most commonly involve family disputes.
Just a few days before the Ilam incident, a man killed himself after shooting and killing his brother, wife and two other relatives near Esfahan.
In Ilam, Police commander Col. Farzad Yasemi said the killer acted out of “personal disputes with management.” He said the killer had recently been dismissed by the Foundation. But the Foundation later denied that he had been fired.
The shooting rampage took place at the Ilam branch of the Mostazafin Foundation, a major conglomerate that manages the country’s mega-projects and businesses. The US Treasury sanctioned the foundation in 2020, describing it as a “key patronage network for Iran’s supreme leader” with some 160 holdings in critical economic sectors including energy, construction and mining.