Iranian film director and Wife Found Stabbed to Death

Noted Iranian film director Dariush Mehrjui has been stabbed to death alongside his wife at their home near Tehran.

The 83-year-old Mehrjui and Vahideh Mohammadifar, were discovered dead with wounds to their necks, the official IRNA news agency quoted a judiciary official as saying.

The official, Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi, said the director’s daughter, Mona Mehrjui, found the bodies when she went to visit her father late on October 14 at the home in a suburb west of the Iranian capital.

Police said that "no signs of forced entry can be seen at the crime scene." 

"Traces have been found" at the scene they believe to be "related to the murderer," they added.

Four suspects have been identified for their links with the case and two have been arrested, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency. 

On October 15, the Etemad newspaper published an interview with Mehrjui’s wife saying she had been threatened and that their home had been burglarized.

The director was known as cofounder of Iran’s film new wave in the 1970s that mainly focused on realism. 

He received many awards, including a Golden Seashell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 1993 and a Silver Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival in 1998.

Mehrjui  studied cinema at the University of California in the early 1960s.

Besides his cinema career, he also translated works by the French playwright Eugene Ionesco and the German Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse into Persian.