Dawud Salahuddin

Dawud Salahuddin, sometimes spelled Daoud Salahuddin (also known as Hassan Abdulrahman or Hassan Tantai) is an American convert to Islam who in 1980 killed Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian dissident and critic of Ruhollah Khomeini, and is in exile in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He shot Tabatabai at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, posing as mailman in the last known successful Iranian assassination plot on U.S. soil. He is the last person known to have seen Robert Levinson, an FBI agent who has been missing since 2007.

Dawud Salahuddin was born David Theodore Belfield in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, on November 10, 1950, and grew up in Bay Shore, New York, on Long Island, in a church-going Baptist family of four boys and one girl.

According to Salahuddin, as an African-American child the "most damage done" to him was the feeling he had that it was "an indecency, an insufficiency, certainly a shame not to be white". 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". After graduating from high school, he attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., for one semester.

He joined a military type group, but eventually left because it opposed his interest in Marxism. He met a musician and a Korean War deserter who convinced him that "Islam was the way for black men to find their destiny." He met most of the militant Islamic leaders in the U.S. and became more radicalized. He found himself at odds with the Chicago version of Islam taught by Elijah Mohammad. He changed his name to Dawud Salahuddin at this time and began to visit Ernest XX MxGee who had changed his name to Hamaas Abdul Khaalis. Salahuddin frequented Khaalis' mosque. In 1973, when Khaalis' family was murdered Salahuddin had "a moment of clarity" and realized, "that the black Islamic leadership in America was being run by like the Mafia.

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