Free Republic

The trial in Sweden of Hamid Noury, an agent of the Iranian regime, ended on May 5th. The prosecutor told the court that there was plenty of evidence to show that Hamid Noury committed the crimes he had been charged with and she asked for him to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict is expected later. The court case in Stockholm has been a direct embarrassment to Iran’s executioner president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his hands-on role in the killing of thousands of political prisoners, including teenagers and even pregnant women, during a notorious massacre...

Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor of Italian origin who led a distinguished life, was at the Auschwitz concentration camp hospital one day due to high fever caused by an infectious disease. He later wrote in his memoirs that when confronted with Soviet soldiers: "They neither greeted nor smiled; they seemed to be tormented by the guilt of why this crime had to happen." The trial of one of the perpetrators of another heinous crime, the massacre of 30,000 Iranian political prisoners in 1988, is currently taking place in a Swedish court. What happened in 1988 was a ruthless, bloody, and...

Nearly 3,000 miles from Tehran where mass executions were carried out in 1988, a murder trial in Sweden could produce new revelations that complicate life for Iran’s president-elect. Iran’s president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, helped decide which prisoners lived or died during mass executions in 1988. A trial in Sweden may shed more light on his role.Credit...West Asia News Agency He was a 28-year-old student and member of a communist group in Iran serving a 10-year prison sentence in 1988 when, according to his family, he was called before a committee and executed without a trial or defense.

This month, tens of thousands of grieving families of victims of the 1988 massacre in Iran received a major boost for their calls for justice. Half a dozen UN experts made public a report that describes the massacre as a “crime against humanity” and deserving of an international investigation. This is a major blow to the Iranian regime and heralds a new era that would see an end to the climate of impunity for the regime’s murderers. After launching a reign of terror and violence against dissent during the 1980s in Iran, in 1988 the ruling mullahs rounded up thousands...

Paris, 1Sept. (IPS) By 1988, there was nothing left of the relatively free atmosphere people acquired for a short period after the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI)’s brutal machine of repression had already uprooted a great number of other thinkers. Thousands of activists and sympathisers of the opposition groups had been already arrested, tortured, forced to repent or summarily executed, and their political rallies and media were banned. The peak of atrocity was however a death-fatwa in summer of 1988 issued by Grand Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of the IRI. The fatwa was initially...