[custom_adv] Bakhtiar was born on 26 June 1914 in southwestern Iran into a family of Iranian tribal nobility, the family of the paramount chieftains of the then powerful Bakhtiari tribe. His father was Mohammad Reza Khan (Sardar-e-Fateh), his mother Naz-Baygom, both Lurs and Bakhtiaris. Bakhtiar's maternal grandfather, Najaf-Gholi Khan Samsam ol-Saltaneh, had been appointed prime minister twice, in 1912 and 1918. [custom_adv] Bakhtiar's mother died when he was seven years old. His father was executed by Reza Shah in 1934 while Shapour was studying in Paris.He attended elementary school in Shahr-e Kord and then secondary school, first in Isfahan and later in Beirut, where he received his high school diploma from a French school. He attended Beirut University for two years. [custom_adv] He and his cousin, Teymour Bakhtiar, then went to Paris for additional university education at the Faculty of Law.[4] There, he attended the College of Political Science.Being a firm opponent of totalitarian rule, he was active in the Spanish Civil War for the Second Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco's fascism. [custom_adv] In 1945, he received his PhD in political science as well as degrees in law from the Faculty of Law of Paris and philosophy from the Sorbonne.Bakhtiar was first married to a French woman with whom he had three children, a son Guy and two daughters, Viviane and France. Viviane died of a heart attack at the age of 49 in Cannes in August 1991. Guy is a French police intelligence unit officer. [custom_adv] On 6 August 1991, Bakhtiar was murdered along with his secretary, Soroush Katibeh, by three assassins in his home in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. Both men were killed with kitchen knives. [custom_adv] Their bodies were not found until at least 36 hours after death, even though Bakhtiar had heavy police protection and his killers had left identity documents with a guard at his house. [custom_adv] Two of the assassins escaped to Iran. A third, Ali Vakili Rad, was apprehended in Switzerland, along with an alleged accomplice, Zeynalabedine Sarhadi, a great-nephew of the president of Iran at the time, Hashemi Rafsanjani. [custom_adv] Both were extradited to France for trial. Vakili Rad was sentenced to life in prison in December 1994, but Sarhadi was acquitted. Rad was paroled on 19 May 2010, after serving 16 years of his sentence. He was received as a hero by Iranian officials.
