A much ignored yet gruesome massacre in Iran’s prisons in 1988 has come to light following three unrelated events. The first is the ascent to the country’s presidency, if not to actual power, of Ebrahim Raisi, a former chief justice, who headed one of the country’s biggest financial trusts (Astan-e-Ghods) for years while maintaining links to the judiciary. In 1988, Raisi sat as deputy prosecutor general in a 4-member committee codenamed the “death commission” which was charged with purging the Tehran and Karaj (a city close to Tehran) prisons of political prisoners still loyal to the banned opposition People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran (the Mujahideen-e Khalq or MEK). Several thousand prisoners already condemned and serving time were thus re-examined, and the majority of them were then executed in a matter of months on orders issued by Raisi and his three colleagues.

The second event is the arrest and trial of “Hamid Noury” in Stockholm’s Arlanda airport in October 2019 as he sought to enter Sweden as a tourist. Noury was actually Hamid Abbasi, a notorious prison official who played a pivotal role in Karaj’s Gohardasht prison in the summer of 1988 in tandem with the death commission in which Raisi had an important role. Some forty former political prisoners who survived the massacre are plaintiffs in Noury’s trial, which began in September 2021. On July 14, 2022, the court condemned Noury to life imprisonment, a verdict that Noury appealed, and the appeals’ hearings, which began on January 11, 2023, are now ongoing. Noury is the first Iranian official to be tried according to the international jurisdiction on war crimes.

The third event involves the alleged role of Iran’s then-ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Jafar Mahallati, in covering up evidence of the mass killings in 1988. An Amnesty International report condemned Mahallati’s actions at that time. According to the report, Mahallati

And article in the Oberlin Review reported, Mahallati is now a tenured professor of religion at Oberlin College. Family members of people killed during the 1988 massacres are currently engaged in a public campaign to have him removed from his academic position in the United States

The People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (MEK) represents a strain of political and religious thinking wholly distinct in substance and in many forms and customs from the religious interpretations and functioning of the ruling system in Iran. The MEK advocates for the equality of women and men in all political, social, and economic aspects. Equality of women and men is something that the Khomeinist clerical establishment does not accept. In Iran today, the legal code is based on women being half the human beings that men are.

Regarding the involvement of religion in government, the MEK believes in the principle of separation of religion from state. It codified this in its “yes” vote to the principle as approved by the National Council of Resistance of Iran. This is an absolute heresy for the ruling theocracy.

From the first day of his rule, Khomeini tried to draw the MEK away from its beliefs and force it to bend to his religious leadership and authority (velayat-e faqih). As it became clear that this was not feasible, he chose to destroy the MEK, first, politically and then to exterminate them physically. In April 1980, Khomeini told a private meeting in Qom with several close clerics:

So, what exactly happened in the summer of 1988 in Iran’s prison system?

The Swedish court prosecutor’s indictment against Hamid Noury reads:

Helpless and frustrated by a growing wave of protests, especially among women, girls, and the younger generation, in the summer of 1988, Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the killing of political prisoners, mainly from the MEK. The fatwa, written in Khomeini’s own handwriting but without a date, was carried out by Khomeini’s religious judges, including Iran’s current president, Ebrahim Raisi. The victims had stood up to Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and challenged the theory of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurisprudent)—the ruling ideology of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini’s fatwa led to the killing of thousands of political prisoners, primarily supporters and members of the MEK. Only after forty years, thousands of testimonies, and the revelation of hundreds of documents did a part of the international community become aware of this horrific crime. At Hamid Noury’s trial in Sweden, Mahmoud Royaie,[5] one of the former prisoners who survived the massacre in the summer of 1988, said the massacre had been planned much earlier by the regime.

This logically precedes the Swedish document. The most important document legitimizing the massacre is a fatwa, a religious ruling, by then-supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, written in his handwriting. It reads as follows:

A 1990 Le Monde article reports:

Among Iranian officials, only Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, the intended successor to Khomeini, objected to the killing following Khomeini’s fatwa. He stated his concerns:

Khomeini was angered by Montazeri’s remarks. As a result, he dismissed Montazeri as his successor, and the latter spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

In August of 2016, Montazeri’s son released an audiotape from Ayatollah Montazeri denouncing the massacre. In the 40-minute tape, recorded during a closed-door meeting between Montazeri and four members of the Death Committee on August 15, 1988, Montazeri charged the attendees with conducting the “purge” of Iranian prisons. Montazeri protested the terrible killing that had begun a few weeks earlier and its magnitude and added:

Montazeri continued: The dimensions of the regime’s intended massacre can be estimated based on the circulation of the MEK publications, which was more than half a million copies before its printing facilities were confiscated, destroyed, and closed. Montazeri’s statement leaves no doubt that Ahmad Khomeini, who was very close to his father, was instrumental and influential in the killing of members and supporters of the MEK, even if the charge against them was only the reading of an MEK newspaper.

Following the 2016 release of the Montazeri audiotape, the MEK massacre became public knowledge for the first time. The Iranian authorities had always sought to suppress this bloody episode, fearing prosecution before an international criminal court for what Amnesty International has described as a “crime against humanity that has gone unpunished.”

In addition to Khomeini’s fatwa, another document in his handwriting and bearing his signature reveals his determination to kill MEK members and supporters. The document is a short text written in response to his son Ahmed’s questions. Fearing the social effects of this sentence and its repercussions inside and outside Iran, some city judges had raised questions and ambiguities about implementing Khomeini’s fatwa. They sent their questions to the head of Khomeini’s court, Moussavi Ardebili. Moussavi feared writing directly to Khomeini to ask him about it. Instead, he asked Ahmad Khomeini to ask his father these questions in writing. Ahmed’s letter to his father reads:

Khomeini’s reply: In a speech to an international online conference in the presence of more than a thousand Iranian former political prisoners, Eric David, an internationally recognized expert on international humanitarian law, declared:

Although the massacre became known in 1988 and the U.N. General Assembly condemned the extrajudicial executions in December 1988, the reaction to the massacre never reached significant dimensions. The full extent of the crime was not known at that time. Still, the inaction by international actors was surprising. A culture of impunity existed in Iran, which continues to this day.

In September 2020, an official letter from a group of 150 U.N. experts—including former U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights and former Irish president Mary Robinson, and Mark Malloch-Brown, former U.N. Deputy Secretary-general—sent to the government of Iran and later published as an official U.N. document on the affair, reads as follows:

The U.N. experts concluded: In a report published in 2017, Amnesty International wrote: Amnesty International‘s research revealed a similar pattern in various provincial prisons. Survivors from these prisons told the organization that prisoners faced unexpected interrogations between late 1987 and mid-July 1988, either orally or through extensive written questionnaires, which focused on their political opinions and continued commitment to opposition groups. Survivors also reported that, during the same period, prison officials and interrogators threatened that, at some point, “they would be ‘dealt with’ and that the prisons would be ‘cleansed.’”[15]

Another pattern that some survivors believe indicates the pre-planned nature of the killings was the massive wave of arrests of hundreds of prisoners, who had been released several years earlier, during the weeks leading up to July 1988 and shortly after the MEK armed incursion on July 25, 1988.

Amnesty International‘s research also points to a nationwide pattern of transferring prisoners unexpectedly and without explanation from their home city to elsewhere, sometimes far from their own provinces, in the months preceding July 1988. Many former prisoners believe these transfers were part of a separation exercise aimed at identifying prisoners who were “steadfast” in their political beliefs and marking them for continued imprisonment and possible elimination.[16]

The prisoners also said that the transfers enabled the authorities to restrict the flow of information during the mass killings in small towns and cities where there was a greater likelihood of families knowing judicial officials and prison guards through local networks and extended families.”

The 2017 Amnesty International report reveals the subsequent deliberate desecration and destruction of several mass graves where the 1988 massacre victims are buried. Documents, including satellite photos, support the evidence of the attempted demolition of these and other mass graves. New buildings and roads with no apparent use have been built over these mass graves.

The report estimates that more than 120 locations across the country contain the remains of victims of the 1988 massacre. It identifies seven sites where destruction of the burial sites has been confirmed or suspected between 2003 and 2017.[17] Large cities like Mashhad have several mass graves. Construction work has begun on the mass gravesites on each of these sites. Satellite images sometimes show very rapid progress on the work.

Testimonies show that in 1988, families of the victims were informed by the authorities that their relatives had been executed without any additional information regarding the circumstances of their death and their burial place. In addition, the families were forbidden to organize memorial gatherings or decorate the graves with flowers and messages in memory of the deceased. Some victims’ relatives have also been prosecuted, imprisoned, and tortured simply for seeking truth and justice.[18] According to Philip Luther, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International:

British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, first president of the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone, and author of Mullahs without Mercy and The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988, has spoken in-depth on the killings, which he calls “a crime against humanity that can be classified as genocide.”[20] He said in his speech:

Although a first in its kind for the mullahs’ regime, Hamid Noury’s trial and sentencing in Sweden harms the ruling clerics in Iran in several ways. First, the daily coverage of testimonies of more than thirty victims of the 1988 massacre, broadcast on several Farsi satellite and online services, creates a problem for the regime within Iranian civil society. On July 14, 2022, the court condemned Noury to life imprisonment, which may set a precedent that would prohibit the highest ranking authorities of Iran from travelling to Europe or elsewhere in the free world.

Ebrahim Raisi himself is one of the first victims. He was supposed to take part in the COP26 summit on the environment in Glasgow. A complaint against him filed by five survivors of the 1988 massacre with the Scottish police may have prompted him to change his mind. Simultaneously with an October 13 press conference held in Glasgow, the Iranian foreign spokesman denied any intention by Raisi to take part in the summit, despite an invitation from the U.N. to heads of states in over two hundred countries.

The latest development is a Swiss federal court ruling ordering Swiss prosecutors to investigate the 1990 assassination of Kazem Rajavi, the representative in Switzerland of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, as a “crime against humanity and genocide.”[22] The murder case, which was going to be shelved on prescription grounds, is considered a continuation of the 1988 massacre. An international arrest warrant against the former Iranian minister of intelligence and security, Ali Fallahian, would thus be renewed along with thirteen other Iranians identified by the Swiss police as perpetrators of Rajavi’s assassination in Geneva.

The ascent to the country’s presidency of Ebrahim Raisi has shed new light on the execution of several thousand prisoners, members of the MEK, as a result of a fatwa by Iran’s then-supreme leader Khomeini. The arrest of Hamid Noury, a notorious prison official who played a pivotal role in the 1988 massacre along with Raisi, threw a further spotlight on the massacre. In the words of Geoffrey Robertson, president of the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone, the 1988 killings are “a crime against humanity” and a “genocide.” However, a strong international reaction to the massacre has never materialized.

Yet, daily coverage of the testimonies of survivors of the massacre continues to create problems for the regime. And the Swedish court’s verdict condemning Noury to life imprisonment sets a precedent that has already affected travel by Iranian officials in Europe or elsewhere in the free world. Still, the culture of impunity that existed in Iran in 1988, continues today.

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