Reports indicate that security and law enforcement agents of Iran’s regime prevented a group of families of political prisoners executed in the 1980s, including during the summer of 1988, from commemorating their loved ones at Khavaran Cemetery, a burial ground in Tehran associated with mass graves of executed political prisoners.
Law enforcement and security agents who had been deployed at the site since the early hours of Friday, December 26, once again blocked families from entering Khavaran Cemetery by closing its gates.
In addition, they prevented families from gathering at the cemetery entrance and from placing photographs of their loved ones and laying flowers. Khavaran Cemetery is the burial site of thousands of political prisoners executed in 1988, most of whom were members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran.
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According to these reports, despite the restrictions, some families laid flowers along the road leading to the entrance or threw their flowers over the walls into Khavaran Cemetery.
Previously, there had been numerous reports of authorities preventing families of political prisoners executed in the 2000s from entering Khavaran Cemetery in Tehran to hold commemorative ceremonies.
In this regard, dozens of family members and survivors of political and religious prisoners who died in the 2000s stated in a letter to Masoud Pezeshkian, published on January 24, 2025, that they have been barred from entering Khavaran Cemetery for more than eleven months and that the official in charge of the site has compounded their suffering through insulting behavior.
In their letter, these families called for the “cessation of burials of other deceased individuals in this cemetery” and the “removal of all obstacles and restrictions to allow their presence and commemoration of their loved ones.”
So far, no news has been published regarding any response from Pezeshkian to the families of the executed. Nevertheless, the prevention of families’ entry into Khavaran Cemetery has continued.
In the summer of 1988, on the orders of Ruhollah Khomeini and based on rulings issued by bodies known as the “Death Committees,” a very large number of political prisoners were executed, even though they were serving their sentences in the prisons of Iran’s regime.
Due to the secrecy of Iran’s regime authorities and institutions, there is no precise figure for the number of those executed, but according to information from the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, nearly 30 thousand people were massacred over several weeks in the summer of 1988.
Khavaran families have repeatedly said that this action by the authorities is not only a desecration of the bodies of the executed, but also an effort to erase evidence of the Iranian regime’s crimes in the 2000s, particularly the massacre of prisoners in the summer of 1988.
Iran’s regime not only takes the lives and the right to life of political opponents through execution and killing but also denies their human dignity by preventing commemorative ceremonies.
By repressing justice-seeking families, Iran’s regime seeks to silence their calls for accountability and isolate them. It also prevents freedom-seeking people from viewing the pursuit of justice as a national responsibility and from joining these families to prevent the repetition of organized state crimes.
