President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar of Iran are assassinated in a bombing. The office of Iran's Prosecutor General blames the People's Mujahedin of Iran.

Mohammad-Ali Rajai was an Iranian politician who served as the second president of Iran from 2 August 1981 until his assassination four weeks later. Before his presidency, Rajai had served as prime minister under Abolhassan Banisadr, while concurrently occupying the position of foreign affairs minister from 11 March 1981 to 15 August 1981. He died in a bombing on 30 August 1981 along with then-prime minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar.

Mohammad-Javad Bahonar was a Shia Iranian theologian and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Iran for less than one month, in August 1981. On August 30, Bahonar and other members of Mohammad-Ali Rajai's government were assassinated by Mujahideen-e Khalq.

The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) or Mojahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), is an Iranian dissident organization. It was an armed group until 2003, afterwards transitioning into a political group. Its headquarters is currently in Albania. The group's ideology was influenced by Islam and revolutionary Marxism; and while it denied Marxist influences, its revolutionary reinterpretation of Shia Islam was shaped by the writings of Ali Shariati. After the Iranian Revolution, the MEK opposed the new theocratic Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, seeking to replace it with its own government. At one point the MEK was Iran's "largest and most active armed dissident group", and it is still sometimes presented by Western political backers as a major Iranian opposition group. The MEK is known to be deeply unpopular today within Iran, largely due to its siding with Iraq in the Iran–Iraq War and continued ties with the government of Saddam Hussein afterwards.

August 30 is the 242nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 123 days remain until the end of the year.