PARIS, Oct 9 (Reuters) – Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who became Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution before fleeing into exile in France, died on Saturday aged 88. He died at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris following a long illness, his wife and children said on Bani-Sadr’s official website. Bani-Sadr had emerged from obscurity to become Iran’s first president in January 1980 with the help of the Islamic clergy. But after a power struggle with radical clerics he fled the following year to France, where he spent the rest of his life. Bani-Sadr recalled then how 40 years earlier in Paris, he had been convinced that the religious leader’s Islamic revolution would pave the way for democracy and human rights after the rule of the Shah.
