HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- Actor who plays film hero decried in US as
an assassin and terrorist
Fiachra Gibbons, arts
correspondent
Thursday January 3, 2002 The Guardian He seemed like a hero for the
times. A black American doctor who had fought with the mojahedin against the
Russians and had returned to treat women suffering under the Taliban.
Except that the actor who plays the character in Kandahar - the film about
Afghanistan which received so much acclaim that President George Bush asked for
a private screening - has now been accused of being an Islamist terrorist who
assassinated an Iranian dissident in the United States.
The bizarre allegations surround a man credited in the film as Hassan Tantai,
but who a US official insists is David Belfield, an American Muslim convert and
the prime suspect in the murder of former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai,
a leading critic of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was shot dead outside his home near
Washington in 1980.
Tantai, a 50-year-old journalist who worked for the state-owned Iran Daily
newspaper after moving to Tehran in 1980 before becoming a mojahedin in
neighbouring Afghanistan, could not be contacted last night, but the film's
director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who often works with non-actors, said: "I never ask
those who act in my films what they've done before."
Doug Gansler, the Maryland state attorney in charge of the case, said: "We
are very confident that the man who appears in the film is indeed David
Belfield.
"He's an assassin and he's a terrorist."
He claims that even after 21 years Belfield, who changed his name to Daoud
Salahuddin on his conversion in 1969, but who Mr Gansler alleges worked in Iran
as Hassan Abdul Rahman before changing it again to Hassan Tantai, is
recognisable.
In an interview with an Iranian film website to promote the film, Tantai
admitted that like many black Americans of his age his identity was elastic.
"I am still trying to figure that [ie who I am] out," he said. "This is not
an uncommon phenomenon among Americans of my generation, the 1960s generation."
Although he has a major part, Tantai's performance is not among the more
memorable in the film, which broke the box office record for the highest
earnings on a single screen when it was shown at the ICA in London last month.
Asked why Makhmalbaf - who has a reputation for playfully putting the cat
among the pigeons in Iran with such films as The Apple - had cast him, he said:
"The director got wind of a black American in Tehran who had been in
Afghanistan, and when he began to locate people to fill those slots, he did not
have many choices."
The White House last night would not be drawn on whether Mr Bush, not known
up until now for his love of Iranian cinema, was aware of the actor's alleged
terrorist links.
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