Repeated Prevention of Victims' Families from Entering Khavaran Cemetery

According to reports, several families of victims and relatives of those executed in the 1980s were prevented from entering their burial site at Khavaran Cemetery. Mansoureh Behkish, a member of the victims' families, and several other sources reported that these families went to Khavaran Cemetery in southern Tehran on Friday, September 2, but a security officer present at the site blocked their entry by closing the cemetery gates. Based on images shared on social media, the families were forced to leave flowers and photos of their loved ones behind the closed gates of the cemetery. The prevention of these families from entering Khavaran has been repeated several times before, including a report in Ordibehesht this year where officials demanded the families' national ID cards. Families of the executed prisoners gather at Khavaran Cemetery every year in September, especially during the first ten days of the month, to commemorate the memory of these victims. The number of these prisoners, who were executed in Mordad and Shahrivar 1987 by the order of Ruhollah Khomeini, the former leader of the Islamic Republic, without due process, is cited in some sources as around three thousand. The Islamic Republic's agents secretly transferred the bodies of these prisoners to Khavaran Cemetery and buried them in mass graves. Ebrahim Raisi, the former president of Iran, was one of the members of the group known as the 'Death Committee,' which was responsible for deciding the fate of prisoners in brief, informal sessions without judicial formalities. In recent years, the Islamic Republic has continued to harass the families of these executed individuals while also digging new graves and burying Baha'i citizens in this location. According to the families of the victims, the Islamic Republic seeks to erase the traces of the mass executions of the 1980s.