Dawud Salahuddin

Dawud Salahuddin (born 1950; sometimes spelled Daoud Salahuddin, also known as Hassan Abdulrahman, Hassan Tantai) is an American-born Iranian fugitive, and worked for the military, as well as in education, as a web designer, film and television. He converted to Islam in 1980 and killed Ali Akbar Tabatabai the same year at Tabatabai's home in Bethesda, Maryland; Tabatabai was an Iranian dissident and critic of Ruhollah Khomeini. Salahuddin is a fugitive from justice living in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Salahuddin is the last person known to have seen Robert Levinson, a CIA agent who disappeared in Kish Island, Iran, in March 2007.

Early life Dawud Salahuddin was born David Theodore Belfield in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, on November 10, 1950. 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 accepted an assignment from the Islamic government to assassinate Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former member of the Shah's regime living in exile in Bethesda, Maryland. When Tabatabai appeared, Salahuddin shot him three times in the abdomen and fled. Tabatabai died 45 minutes later at a hospital. In conversations with a reporter from The New Yorker magazine he denied the killing was "murderous", stating it was "an act of war...In Islamic religious terms, taking a life is sometimes sanctioned and even highly praised, and I thought that event was just such a time."

In his over 30 years as a fugitive, he has worked as an English teacher, a war correspondent, and a web editor. He fought the Soviets alongside the Afghan Mujahideen, and acted "in a film (Kandahar) by one of Iran's leading directors" in 2000. According to Salahuddin he was a soldier with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from December 1986 to May 1988. On March 25, 2020, Levinson's family reported that US officials had informed them that Levinson died in Iranian custody. Salahuddin is currently on the FBI fugitives list.

Film appearances

Kandahar Salahuddin is also an actor and he played a starring role as a sympathetic character who aided the heroine of the 2001 film Kandahar by director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The heroine of the film is a Canadian woman, born in Afghanistan, who slips back into Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban to try to rescue her sister. During her travels, she is befriended by an English-speaking medic (Salahuddin), an exiled American political activist. The heroine of the film did travel to Afghanistan, in an attempt to rescue her friend, and Salahuddin is an American in exile for a "political activity".

In response to criticism of his casting of Salahuddin, Makhmalbaf wrote in The Guardian that he (Makhmalbaf), had been tortured by the SAVAK, of which the murder victim Tabatabai was "a prominent member", and that Tabatabai's brother "does not understand that Belfield [Salahuddin] is also a victim—a victim of the ideal he believed in. His humanity when he opened fire against his ideological enemy, was martyred by his idealism". After the film was released, Doug Gansler, then State's Attorney for Montgomery County, later Attorney General of Maryland, said that Salahuddin was still a wanted man.