"Show No Mercy!"; The Shadow of That Ruling

Thirty years ago, during these autumn days, the flames of one of the most fiery punitive actions of the government against the opposition were extinguished after a deadly two-month period. This covert action, ordered by the highest authority of the government and carried out by a three-member committee in an extrajudicial process, sent a large but unspecified number of political prisoners, mostly members of the Mojahedin and leftists, to the gallows or in front of firing squads; prisoners who were either serving their sentences or even on the verge of release. The execution committee, consisting of Hossain Ali Niri, the Sharia judge, Morteza Eshraqi, the prosecutor of Tehran, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a representative of the Ministry of Intelligence, sent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political prisoners to death based on a brief ruling from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The essence of the ruling was: "They are combatants, show no mercy." Finally, in the days marking the thirtieth anniversary of this event, the then-leader of the Islamic Republic officially ended this extrajudicial process after several bloody weeks; as recorded in the memoirs of Hashemi Rafsanjani, on October 5, 1988, he entrusted the review of the status of the remaining political prisoners to the Expediency Discernment Council, emphasizing that the review should be conducted according to the usual procedures and before the summer of 1988.