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Iran regime planning to destroy mass graves of 1988 massacred political prisoners

Iran - gravesNCRI, August 30 – The mullahs’ anti-human regime is planning to turn Khavaran cemetery in East Tehran, where the victims of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners are buried in mass graves, into a public cemetery under the guise of developing the area. This is a bid to destroy the most important evidence on the mass murder of 30,000 political prisoners who belonged to the People’s Mojahedin and other dissident groups or currents.

Some time ago, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered then-Tehran Mayor and now President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to prepare a plan to this end. Recently, Tehran’s municipality sent a number of its operatives to implement the plan, but they were met with protests by the victims’ families at the cemetery.

Given that the vast majority of the massacred prisoners were buried in mass graves without their identities and graves being established, such a change would practically mean destroying the graves of these martyrs and eliminating the traces of this horrific crime, which is one of the clearest cases of crime against humanity.

During the massacre in 1988, even those prisoners who had completed their sentences were executed according to Khomeini’s fatwa, in which he said, "As the treacherous Monafeqin [Mojahedin] do not believe in Islam and what they say is out of deception and hypocrisy,… it is decreed that those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the Monafeqin, are waging war on God and are condemned to execution… It is naïve to show mercy to those who wage war on God. The decisive way in which Islam treats the enemies of God is among the unquestionable tenets of the Islamic state. I hope that with your revolutionary rage and vengeance toward the enemies of Islam, you would achieve the satisfaction of Almighty God. Those who are making the decisions must not hesitate, nor show any doubt or be concerned with details. They must try to be ‘most ferocious against infidels.’"

Then President and now Supreme Leader Khamenei was among the principals who carried out Khomeini’s fatwa. Interior Minister Mullah Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, then deputy Intelligence Minister, was one of the three members of the death commission which ordered the executions of group after group of prisoners.

The Iranian Resistance urges the United Nations Secretary General, High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Executions to take urgent steps to prevent the destruction of Khavaran cemetery. It also calls on them to send a delegation to Iran to specify the names and the graves of the victims. The criminal mullahs must not be allowed to destroy the documents and evidence of their crimes against humanity with impunity.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
August 30, 2005