SECRET LIST COULD LEAD TO ARREST OF 17 IRANIAN OFFICIALS
▶ Arrest warrants issued after UK lawyer lobbies prosecutors, writes Paul Peachey in London
Acampaigner in the UK whose work helped lead to the arrest of an Iranian lawyer allegedly involved in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners has provided international prosecutors with evidence against nearly 20 regime officials.
The first man on the list to be seized, Hamid Nouri, 61, has been held in Sweden for 17 months for his alleged role in “death committees” that organised the killing of opposition and left-wing figures.
The secret list is believed to also include Ebrahim Raisi, potential successor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and head of the Iranian judiciary. He has been identified as a key figure in the killings in Iranian prisons after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988.
Days after the end of war, former Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini signed a death warrant for thousands of prison inmates linked to the opposition.
Within weeks, up to 5,000 had been killed, a 2011 report said. A second wave of killings of left-wing critics of the regime followed.
Mr Raisi was identified in the 142-page report by human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson for alleged involvement in the prison killings. Mr Robertson was commissioned by the Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre in the US, which has compiled evidence and witness statements of survivors.
Mr Nouri was arrested in 2019 after a dossier compiled by a group including Iraj Mesdaghi, a former political prisoner, and UK lawyer Kaveh Moussavi was presented to the Swedish authorities.
They had learnt that Mr Nouri was planning to travel to Sweden to resolve a family dispute.
Mr Moussavi told The National he has lobbied prosecutors inside and outside of Europe to arrest 17 other current and former officials said to be implicated in crimes covering more than 40 years from 1978.
“There are 17 other international arrest warrants under seal,” Mr Moussavi said.
“That’s at least 17 people worried, thinking they might be on the list.”
The human-rights lawyer, who declined to identify the persons for fear of tipping them off, said they included a government minister, former prison guards and members of the Iranian judiciary and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Lawyers, including Mr Moussavi, lobbied German prosecutors for the arrest and prosecution of Gholamreza Mansouri, a former judge who fled Iran last year after he was accused of corruption.
Mansouri arrived in Germany before heading to Romania, where he was arrested and released after questioning. He died shortly afterwards after falling six storeys from the window of a Romanian hotel in a suspected suicide.
Campaign group Reporters Without Borders had also sought the arrest of Mansouri. He was accused of working with the IRGC to detain and torture journalists.
Mr Moussavi said that a third suspect was planning to fly to Denmark this year but authorities found out about his possible arrest and the official disembarked minutes before the aircraft took off.
Mr Nouri was arrested after he landed at Stockholm Arlanda Airport in November 2019 and was held under the principle of universal jurisdiction, whereby crimes against humanity can be prosecuted no matter when or where they were committed.
A specialist war crimes unit of the Swedish police and the country’s public prosecutor are investigating, said Rebecca Mooney, a British lawyer working on the case. The public prosecutor said a date for a trial has not been set.
“This case is the first case of universal jurisdiction against the Iranian regime, which I hope will open the floodgates,” Mr Moussavi said. “I know it has sent shivers down the spines of these people.”
Activists said Mr Nouri was a prosecutor at Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, where political prisoners were sentenced to death after going before the socalled death committee.
He is accused by campaigners of involvement in torture, including whipping people on the soles of their feet, and extorting money from relatives of inmates in return for converting death sentences into long jail terms, Mr Moussavi said.
Mr Nouri is also accused of handing out sweets and cakes to inmates who survived a round of executions to exert psychological pressure on those who remained.
His lawyer in Sweden told reporters in 2019 that the arrest was a case of mistaken identity. He did not respond to a request for comment. A Swedish lawyer working on the case said formal charges could be revealed next month.
Mr Mesdaghi – who spent a decade inside three prisons from the 1980s – said he expects to give evidence in June.
He has spent years researching the crimes and tracking the movements of the alleged perpetrators.
“I was a prisoner at Gohardasht Prison,” he said. “During the massacre, Nouri was the representative of the prosecution in that prison.”
Mr Mesdaghi said he also later saw Mr Nouri at Evin Prison in Tehran.
“I had a lot of contacts with him – we know each other well,” he said.
He said he had been blindfolded on death row but was able to see through the material and witnessed crimes against humanity.
“The crime was happening in Iran so we couldn’t prosecute this over there,” he said. “But now, I’m a Swedish citizen, my second country, and they are going to do that. I’m very proud.”
The Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre said it was thrilled at the prospect of a trial after years of work charting torture cases. It commissioned the Robertson report, which concluded that Iran felt emboldened to flout international laws because the UN failed to hold it accountable for the killings.
“We have been working like ants for 20-odd years to document, one-by-one, the cases,” said ABC executive director Roya Boroumand.
“We have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people about what happened in Iran and been able to provide background to the prosecution.
“Revolutionaries were young and therefore many are still alive.”
Little more than a week after what he described as drinking a “cup of poison” by accepting UN-backed ceasefire in the war with Iraq in July of 1988, Khomeini sought vengeance on the opposition who sided with Saddam Hussein.
He ordered the death of all Mujahideen-e-Khalq prisoners in the country’s jails. The group backed the overthrow of the shah but then became the implacable foe of the regime after hundreds of its members were killed at a 1981 rally against the government.
After the ceasefire, three-man death committees identified thousands of dissidents in its prisons and ordered the deaths of those who failed in their tests of loyalty to the regime. Those selected were blindfolded and “ordered to join a conga-line that led straight to the gallows”, Mr Robertson said in his report.
“They were hung from cranes, four at a time, or in groups of six from ropes hanging from the front of the stage in an assembly hall; some were taken to army barracks at night, directed to make their wills and then shot by firing squad.”
Their bodies were doused with disinfectant and buried at night in secret mass graves. Their families only learnt of their fate months later, when they were handed a plastic bag containing their meagre posessions.
By mid-August, up to 5,000 people had been killed, Mr Robertson found. After a 10day lull, the slaughter continued, with left-wing and Marxist supporters killed for apostasy.
Human-rights groups highlighted the horrors but the international community failed to act, because it hoped that Iran would moderate its policies after the end of the war. The first arrest in connection with the killings happened 31 years later.
Of the horrors perpetrated since the end of the Second World War, the killing of thousands of prisoners in Iranian jails in 1988 ranks among the worst, Mr Robertson found.
“Comparisons are odious, especially between atrocities, but the Iranian prison slaughter strikes me as the worst of all,” he wrote in his final report.
“In the annals of postwar horrors, the killings compare with the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in terms of the vulnerability of the victims, and they exceed it when measured by the cold-blooded calculations made at the very pinnacle of state power.”
There are 17 other international arrest warrants under seal. That’s at least 17 people worried
KAVEH MOUSSAVI Lawyer and former political prisoner