Killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei not the first time a foreign leader has been targeted by another state, international experts say

The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S. and Israeli strikes is not the first time a foreign leader has been targeted by another state, international experts said on Sunday.

Professor Luca Trenta of Swansea University, who wrote a book about assassinations in US foreign policy, said the U.S. is suspected of playing a role in assassinations in other states, including the 1961 killings of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

Apart from the U.S., Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin also considered killing Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia in 1953, while the Soviet Union killed Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin in 1979 in the context of the invasion, Trenta said.

“One key point is that the US government is prohibited from conducting assassination by an executive order first established in 1975 (EO 11905) and confirmed ever since,” Trenta said.

Previously, he added, the U.S. sought to justify attacks that could harm other countries’ leaders, for example in Libya or Iraq, as self-defense or with their military roles.

The U.S. President “Trump’s admissions and the statements since the killing of Khamenei suggest that even this feeble hurdle, this fiction of respecting the ban on assassination is gone,” he said.

Marko MIlanovic, professor of international law at Reading University, explained that targeting a head of state or government in peacetime is a “clear violation of international law,” In wartime, if political leaders are members of the armed forces they are combatants like any other members of the armed forces and are not immune from attack, he said.  — AP