Assassination of Amin al-Sultan (Atabak-e Azam) in Front of Parliament, Coinciding with the Signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in Saint Petersburg

On August 31, 1907, two events in two separate corners of the world shaped the destiny of Iran. In Tehran, Mirza Ali Asghar Khan Amin al-Sultan, known as Atabak-e Azam—the prime minister of the time and one of the signatories of the Tobacco Regie concession—was shot upon exiting the National Consultative Assembly by Abbas Aqa Tabrizi, an Azerbaijani money changer and constitutionalist fedai. Abbas Aqa, who had acted under the incitement of certain constitutionalist figures including Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh, found himself surrounded after opening fire and took his own life with a gunshot. In the turbulent atmosphere of the Constitutional Movement, Atabak's assassination served to bolster the constitutionalist faction, ultimately contributing to the Conquest of Tehran.

However, on that very same day in Saint Petersburg, the capital of Russia, Sir Arthur Nicolson, the British Ambassador, and Alexander Iswolsky, the Foreign Minister of Tsarist Russia, signed a treaty that later became known as the "1907 Agreement" or the "Anglo-Russian Convention of Saint Petersburg." Under this agreement, without the Iranian government having any role in the decision-making, the country was partitioned into three spheres: the northern region, extending along an imaginary line from Qasr-e Shirin to Isfahan, Yazd, Khaf, and the Afghan border, as Russia's sphere of influence; the southern region, stretching from Bandar Abbas to Kerman and Birjand, as Britain's sphere of influence; and a neutral buffer zone in between. Concurrently, Sir Percy Cox, the British Minister, presented the memorandum partitioning Iran to the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This striking coincidence creates a dual drama: in Tehran, a young man takes the prime minister's life to defend the fledgling constitutional framework, while during those exact same hours in the capital of another empire, that very same country is carved up between two great powers without the knowledge of its people.