Paris, October 9 (BNA) Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who became the first president of Iran after the 1979 revolution before fleeing to exile in France, died at the age of 88.
His wife and children said on the official Bani-Sadr website that he died at the Petit-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris after a long illness.
Bani-Sadr emerged from obscurity to become Iran’s first president in January 1980 with the help of Islamic clerics.
But after a power struggle with radical clerics, he fled the following year to France, where he would spend the rest of his life, according to Reuters.
Bakangad Jamaluddin, a longtime aide, told Reuters by phone that his family wanted to bury him in Versailles, the Paris suburb where he lived during his exile.