[citation needed] In 1963 he describes himself as having become politicized while watching news footage from Birmingham, Alabama, showing commissioner of public safety Bull Connor turn back civil-rights marchers with fire hoses and dogs, which caused him to develop "an implacable hatred toward all symbols of American authority".
[citation needed] But Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian exile, had been holding meetings of a counter-revolutionary group at his home in Bethesda, and the Islamic government wanted him eliminated.
[13] In conversations with a reporter from The New Yorker magazine he denied the killing was "murderous", stating it was "an act of war...In Islamic religious terms, taking a life is sometimes sanctioned and even highly praised, and I thought that event was just such a time.
Three other people were indicted in the United States in the Tabatabai murder for aiding and abetting, including Horace Anthony Butler (also known as Ahmed Rauf), William Caffee, and Lee Curtis Manning (also known as Ali Abdul-Mani).
[12] Salahuddin arrived in Iran on July 31, 1980, and has lived there most of the time, with short periods in other Muslim countries and North Korea, being careful not to expose himself to extradition back to the United States for homicide.
[citation needed] According to the BBC, Salahuddin is known "by several other names", and U.S. magazine Time reported "he is also known as Hassan Abdul Rahman, a former editor of the state-sponsored English-language newspaper Iran Daily".
[7] Salahuddin worked as chief online editor for Press TV, an English-language international television channel funded by the Iranian government, for three years before resigning in July 2009 following the disputed presidential elections.
He is "close" to prominent Iranian reformists film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Masoumeh Ebtekar, the former spokeswoman for the hostage-takers at the United States Embassy in Tehran.
Shortly after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. intelligence agents established contact with Salahuddin, who "began a back-channel relationship with American authorities and talked about returning to the United States to stand trial in the murder of Tabatabai".
He sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno dated March 5, 1994, proposing mediating between the United States and "certain key figures in the worldwide Islamic movement" in return for freedom from prosecution.
[citation needed] Salahuddin is also an actor and he played a starring role as a sympathetic character who aided the heroine of the 2001 film Kandahar by director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.