The Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini (1902 - 1989) was a Shiite Muslim who took control of Iran after a revolution overthrew in 1979 one of the twin pillars of Western cooperative security arrangements in the Persian Gulf, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. President Reagan criticized Khomeini as "a maniacal fanatic who has slaughtered thousands and thousands of people calling it executions." Other reports appeared in the Iranian daily newspaper Ettelaat and later an eyewitness gave an account to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine in 2002. Some 100,000 were killed this way.