IRAN: On the Slopes of Haft Kuh

Last spring, when three Americans traveling by jeep across the Tangeorkheh desert were ambushed and slain (TIME, April 8), the Iranian Cabinet fell, and the Shah of Iran personally ordered his gendarmes to bring in the head of the killer, a notorious bandit named Dadshah. Nineteen members of Dadshah's band (including his brother Ahmad Shah) were captured as they crossed the border into Pakistan; the rest scattered into the desert and the trackless barrens of the Kuh Sefid mountain range. Occasionally, Dadshah lashed out at his pursuers, as when he raided an encampment of tribesmen commissioned to capture him and killed a dozen of them.

Three months ago the gendarme net closed around the rugged slopes of Haft Kuh (Seven Mountains), where Dadshah and the remnants of his outlaws had gone to earth. Last week the police began the final assault on his mountain stronghold and carried the rampart in hand-to-hand fighting. Eight gendarmes died, but they accomplished their mission: Dadshah and another of his brothers were killed, and the rest of his band surrendered.