Security agents blocked the families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s from visiting their loved ones’ graves in Khavaran Cemetery. Khavaran is a burial site in southeast Tehran, notorious for containing mass graves of political prisoners executed by Iran’s regime, especially during the 1988 massacre.
Security agents of Iran’s regime prevented the families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s from accessing their graves in Khavaran.
The families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s—particularly during the bloody summer of 1988—went to Khavaran on Friday, November 28, to honor their loved ones. However, security agents kept the cemetery gates closed and prevented the families from reaching the graves.
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In the summer of 1988, Iran’s regime carried out a mass execution of political prisoners, most of them members and supporters of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). It is estimated that around 30,000 prisoners were executed that year.
The families gathered beside the outer walls of Khavaran Cemetery and placed flowers on the photos of their loved ones behind the locked gates to commemorate them.
Meanwhile, security and military forces tried to scatter the families and push them away by removing and disrupting the flowers placed at the site.
For more than four decades, Iran’s regime has spoken to the survivors of its repression and massacres—whether in prisons or on the streets—only through violence, intimidation, and threats. The regime has not even recognized the families’ basic right to visit the graves of their loved ones. Yet it has always faced the steadfast resistance of these families.
For more than 40 years, the Khavaran families have never stopped honoring the memory of their loved ones. Even by gathering behind the locked gates of Khavaran, they have ensured that the execution of political prisoners in the 1980s—especially the 1988 massacre—will not be forgotten.
In this context, a group of families of political and religious prisoners who died in the 1980s wrote a letter in September 2024 to Masoud Pezeshkian, the current president of Iran’s regime, stating that for more than eleven months they had been barred from entering Khavaran Cemetery and that the agents’ insulting behavior had doubled their suffering. Pezeshkian has not responded to this letter.
These families—including those whose loved ones were executed in the summer of 1988—had demanded in their letter the “halt of burying new deceased individuals in this cemetery” and the “removal of all obstacles and restrictions preventing them from visiting and commemorating their loved ones.”
They had written: “For eleven months, Khavaran Cemetery has been closed to us. We have repeatedly visited and written to various officials, offices, and institutions of Iran’s regime, requesting the reopening of the cemetery to allow us our right to mourn and freely visit the graves of our loved ones, but we have received no response.”
The families and survivors of political and religious prisoners who died in the 1980s added that their letter of grievance—after months of going from one institution to another—was forwarded by the Tehran Provincial Security Council to the Ministry of Intelligence. After several weeks and further follow-up, officials at the Ministry of Intelligence responded with “an insulting attitude and explicitly emphasized that they would not be providing any answers.”
In a letter published on January 25, 2025, addressed to Pezeshkian, the families wrote: “We have repeatedly and patiently sought justice through legal means—writing letters and making repeated visits to responsible institutions, the municipality, the city council, and the security office of Behesht Zahra Cemetery—but to no avail. Once again, we demand the most basic human, social, and legal right of survivors to visit the graves of their loved ones, namely the ‘right to mourn.’”
Meanwhile, the global Bahá’í community reported in March 2024 that the graves of more than thirty deceased Bahá’í citizens, who had been buried in a mass grave in Khavaran Cemetery in Tehran, had been destroyed.
