Families of Victims Demand Access to Khavaran Cemetery from Pezeshkian

Dozens of members of the Khavaran victims' families wrote a letter to Masoud Pezeshkian, asking him to open the doors of this cemetery to them. 93 citizens, whose family members are buried in Khavaran Cemetery, stated in a letter addressed to the President of Iran that the doors of Khavaran have been closed to them for eleven months and demanded a halt to the burial of deceased Baha'is in Khavaran Cemetery. Radio Farda had previously reported that the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic has forced Baha'i citizens to bury their deceased in this section by digging several new graves in Khavaran since the beginning of the year 1402. Khavaran Cemetery is the burial site of the mass execution victims of the summer of 1988, located in the old section of the Baha'i cemetery in Tehran, Golestan-e Javid. In their open letter on Saturday, a copy of which was sent to the head of the judiciary, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, the Security Council of Tehran province, the City Council, and the Tehran Municipality, the Khavaran families announced that their follow-ups with the responsible institutions have yielded no results so far. The signatories of this letter stated that Masoud Momeni, the representative of the Ministry of Intelligence at the Baha'i cemetery, has restricted access to Khavaran with 'insulting' behavior, saying, 'For a long time, they have prevented the survivors from entering the burial site by erecting high concrete walls, installing cameras, and locking the doors of Khavaran.' For over three decades, the Iranian government has sought to destroy or change the use of the mass graves of political prisoners executed in 1988 and secretly buried in Khavaran and other parts of Iran. A four-member group, commanded by Ruhollah Khomeini, the then-leader of the Islamic Republic, 're-tried' thousands of political and ideological prisoners who were serving their sentences in prisons in the summer of 1988 and executed them on political charges. The bodies of the executed, most of whom were members of the imprisoned Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization and leftist prisoners, were secretly buried in mass graves. More than three decades after these executions, officials of the Islamic Republic are still in the process of destroying Khavaran Cemetery, the most famous burial site of these executed individuals. Hossein Ali Niri, Morteza Eshraqi, Ebrahim Raisi, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi were four judicial officials and key figures of this 'Death Commission.'