The Cinema Rex Fire (1978)

The Cinema Rex fire was an arson attack on a cinema in Abadan, in southwest Iran, on the evening of 19 August 1978. The doors were barred and the hall set alight during a screening, and somewhere between about 377 and 430 people died, by the most commonly cited counts. Most Iranians at the time blamed the shah’s secret police, and the fire turned a growing protest movement into a national revolt, although later trials and research point to Islamist militants.

Abadan in the summer of 1978

Abadan was the oil city of Iran, built around the great refinery on the Shatt al-Arab (Arvand Rud), with a large working-class population (see Abadan and Khorramshahr). By August 1978 protests against the shah had been spreading for months in a cycle of forty-day mourning ceremonies for those killed in earlier demonstrations. Cinemas had become targets. Religious militants regarded them as centres of Western immorality, and in the weeks before the Rex fire several cinemas, bars and restaurants had been set on fire in other towns, usually when they were empty.

The date was symbolic. 19 August was the 25th anniversary of the 1953 coup that had restored the shah, a day the government marked and the opposition mourned. It also fell in the month of Ramadan.

The night of the fire

The Rex was showing The Deer, a 1974 film by Masoud Kimiai about a drug addict and an old friend turned armed rebel, which had itself had trouble with the censors. A few hundred people were in the hall. Shortly after eight in the evening, men poured fuel around the entrances and set it alight. The doors were shut and could not be opened from the inside, and the building filled with fire and smoke within minutes.

Survivors and residents later complained bitterly that help came too late: fire engines were slow to arrive, water was short, and people outside could not break in. Almost everyone inside died. The scale of the deaths, in a city where most families knew someone in the hall, set it apart from all the earlier attacks.

Two stories at the time

Within days, two opposite explanations were circulating.

• The government blamed the opposition. Officials first spoke of “Islamic Marxists” and pointed out that militants had been burning cinemas all summer.
• The opposition and most of the public blamed SAVAK. Why, they asked, would revolutionaries kill hundreds of ordinary people, and why had the police and fire services failed so badly? From exile in Najaf, Khomeini accused the regime. Many believed the state had staged the fire to discredit the movement.

Given the record of SAVAK, the public found the second story easier to believe. Thousands of mourners in Abadan chanted against the shah, and the anger spread to other cities. On 27 August the prime minister, Jamshid Amuzegar, resigned and the shah appointed Jafar Sharif-Emami to lead a “government of national reconciliation”. Within two weeks came the shootings of Black Friday in Tehran.

The trial of 1980

After the revolution, families of the dead pressed the new authorities for answers, including through a long sit-in in Abadan in 1980. Earlier, in February 1979, a revolutionary court had executed a police officer, Monir Taheri, accused of a role in the fire; he denied having been in Abadan at the time.

The main trial opened in Abadan in August 1980 and ran into September, with 26 defendants. The central figure was Hossein Takbalizadeh, a young man from Abadan who said he had set the fire with three companions, all of whom died in the blaze. Testimony at the trial pointed to links between the group and religious activists in the city. He and five others were sentenced to death and executed in public in September 1980.

The trial left questions open. Critics, including some of the victims’ families, said the court avoided examining the clerical activists in Abadan to whom Takbalizadeh had been connected. The official line of the Islamic Republic has never fully settled on one account, and some publications in Iran continued to blame the old regime.

How historians see it now

Most historians writing since the 1980s accept that the arson was carried out by militants from the Islamist opposition rather than by SAVAK. Michael Axworthy summed up the evidence of trials and investigations as pointing to a radical Islamic group with connections to clerics. Others note that the arsonists may have meant to burn a cinema, as in earlier attacks, without foreseeing that hundreds would die, and that the locked doors and slow rescue made the toll far worse. Who ordered the attack, if anyone did beyond the local group, remains disputed.

What is not in dispute is its effect. Because the public blamed the state, a crime committed by opponents of the regime became one of the strongest blows against it. Historians of the revolution treat the Rex fire as the point at which the protests stopped being mainly religious and student affairs and drew in very large numbers of ordinary people, a story continued on the page about the causes of the 1979 revolution.

The fire also marked Iranian cinema. Attacks on cinemas continued through 1978, and after 1979 many theatres were closed or renamed; see Iranian cinema before 1979.