Iranian regime agents once again prevented the families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s from entering Khavaran Cemetery in Tehran to hold a memorial ceremony.
A group of families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s visited Khavaran Cemetery on Friday, August 23, to commemorate their loved ones.
According to the report, in addition to closing the cemetery gates, the government agents also removed the photos and flowers that the families had placed at the entrance of the cemetery.
For some time now, the Iranian government has been preventing Khavaran families from visiting the cemetery while simultaneously forcibly burying the bodies of Baha’i citizens in the section designated for political prisoners executed in the summer of 1988.
The Khavaran families believe that the Iranian regime’s goal is to erase the “evidence of the crime of massacring political prisoners in the 1980s, especially in the summer of 1988,” and they have repeatedly protested this practice.
Khavaran Cemetery, located in southeastern Tehran along Khavaran Road and adjacent to several cemeteries belonging to religious minorities, contains the bodies of thousands of political and ideological prisoners executed in the summer of 1988. They were buried secretly and without identification in mass graves.
These political prisoners, who were members and supporters of opposition political organizations, especially the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), were executed by order of the so-called “Death Committee.”
A recent report by Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, designated the executions of political prisoners in the 1980s as “atrocity crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” The 1988 massacre, in particular, was described as a “genocide.”
