Keyvan Salami

Iran’s Most Feared Mullah Acknowledges Massacre of Political Prisoners

Iran massacred over 30,000 political prisoners in summer of 1988 and kept a lid on this atrocity for three decades. In this year’s presidential election a conservative cleric by the name of Ebrahim Raisi, one of the perpetrators of the massacre, was selected as a main candidate, resurfacing the 1988 massacre and forcing regime officials, one after another, to confess about the carnage.

Last week in an unprecedented interview, former Iranian intelligence minister Ali Fallahian revealed the mindset behind the 1988 mass execution. Fallahian, described as “perhaps the most feared mullah in Iran” by Newsweek, is wanted by Interpol for his involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In his interview Fallahian explains whoever had any relation with the Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) was condemned to death.

“Imam [Khomeini] said you must execute those who are steadfast in their beliefs,” he said referring to the Iranian regime founder. “We couldn’t let them go and couldn’t keep them in jail. If we had kept them in jail, we would have had a bunch of people over our head telling us don’t keep them in jail. So a 3-man team of judges and ministers was assigned to oversee these cases, release those who were eligible and execute those that were not,” he continued.

In the summer of 1988 Khomeini issued a religious decree calling for the massacre.

“Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the (PMOI/MEK) must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately! … Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the MEK are waging war on God, and are condemned to execution … It is naive to show mercy to those who wage war on God,” the decree reads in part.

A committee of four men was formed to implement the order, and in a matter of a few months over 30,000 political prisoners were executed, mostly members and supporters of the main opposition PMOI/MEK.

“The principal point was to execute all prisoners, except those who were eligible for parole?” asks the interviewer.

“They were supposed to check and see and talk to the prisoners to find out if they still adhere to their beliefs,” Fallahian responds.

“What was the benchmark for evaluating who is steadfast and who is not?” asks the interviewer. “To say that I believe in the PMOI and don’t believe in you,” Fallahian explains.

Last year the revelation of an audio tape and unpublished letters of the late Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, former successor to Khomeini, shed light on new dimensions of this grave crime. Pregnant women and girls as young as 14 and 15 years old were among those executed, Mr. Montazeri wrote.