The Serial Murders (Part II) PDF Print E-mail
Saturday, 26 November 2005
ImageThe forgotten victims

These four victims were the only ones whose killings were later acknowledged as having been perpetrated by a gang headed by Saeed Emami or Eslami, the Deputy Minister of Intelligence.  There were many other mysterious killings, however, which may possibly have been the work of this death squad, or of other assassins in the Ministry.  Dozens of intellectuals, writers and journalists opposed to the régime had disappeared or died suddenly or by violent means in the years leading up to the chain murders. In January, 1999, the Iranian Human Rights Working Group (IHRWG) in the British Parliament wrote to the UN calling their attention to the “chilling resemblance, in terms of their targets and methods, to an earlier string of disappearances and mysterious deaths that occurred in 1996 and 1997”.


The lawyer for Mohammad Pouyandeh’s family claimed to have gathered the details of 80 murders which according to him had been political.  Commenting on his allegation, the pro-Khamenei daily, Ressalat, wrote: “He has made this information available to foreign media but did not explain his reasons for collecting [it] or why he has not provided it to the relevant security and intelligence agencies.” The paper added: “It must be said that he has recently made comments that required the security agencies to take the appropriate action regarding the correctness or falsity of these remarks”.

Majid Sharif went missing after he left home in apparently perfect health on November 20, 1998.  A translator and journalist, he had contributed to the publication Iran-e-Farda (Tomorrow’s Iran).  He was a follower of the late Dr Ali Shariati, referred to by some as the Father of the Islamic Revolution, a scholar who advocated the modernisation of Islam. (He was murdered by SAVAK agents in Britain three weeks after he had fled the Shah’s Iran, on June 19, 1977 .  Sharif’s family identified his body in a Tehran morgue on November 24, 1998.  The body did not appear to be injured, and press reports suggested heart failure as the cause of death.  The literary community, however, called for a full investigation into his death and previous disappearance, and it was suspected that he had paid the penalty for writing about a more modern interpretation of Islam.

Pirouz Davani, General Secretary of the Organisation of Union for Democracy In Iran (OUDI), left his house in Tehran on the morning of August 28, 1998 and was immediately abducted by plain clothes agents.  “Since then, we have no information concerning his whereabouts”, his brother Majid Davani said on November 22, 1998.  It was reported, however, that an anonymous caller rang his mother the day after the murder of Dariush Forouhar and his wife, to say that Pirouz Davani had been executed.  His mother died of a heart attack hours later.

Davani had been active in the Left opposition to the Shah, but rapidly fell out with the mullahs also when they came to power in 1979.  He received a seven-month prison sentence in 1981, and spent four years in Evin Prison from 1990 to 1994.  He was tortured in the first six months of that imprisonment, and also received 50 lashes.  After his release, he had openly published political bulletins and organised seminars .  None of these activities posed a serious challenge to the regime.

Another dissident, Rostami Hamedani, went missing in mid-December 1998 , though it had been reported even earlier that he had been murdered in his eponymic town of Hamedan.  His politics were close to Pirouz Davani’s and he had been actively writing critical articles against the government.

There were three other murders, and four other disappearances in January 1999, which may have been politically motivated.  Fatemeh Eslami, the wife of a translator, was found strangled to death at her home on January 13.  Jurist Javad Emami and his wife were killed in their home in northern Tehran January 17.  On January 20, the Iranian daily Arya reported that relatives of Mahmoud Meydani Amur Ghafouri, Morteza Olian Najafabadi, and Sara Eftekhari appealed to President Mohammad Khatami and expressed their fear that the disappeared had been killed .

“In a letter published in Payam magazine, Mansoureh Ghafouri revealed that six (former) political prisoners had disappeared in Mashad in 1996-97.  All had been kidnapped between September 1996 and April 1997, Mrs Ghafouri’s husband and brother among them.  One of the missing persons is Morteza Olian Najafabadi ”.  Morteza, according to his sister, left his home on January 19, 1997 to go to work and never returned.  She added, “During Mr Khatami’s tenure, we have received letters saying that they have asked the Intelligence Ministry, who told them that he (her brother) is not with them (the ministry)”. She insisted, however, that her brother left home in his car, and that they had reliable information that his car is in the Intelligence Ministry warehouse.

Yet another writer, Akbar Ganji, editor of the weekly Rah-e No (New Way) was approached by two men as he was leaving his office in Tehran at 18.10 on December 13, 1998.  They asked where they could find Akbar Ganji and he, without identifying himself, asked them who they were.  After a short exchange they ran away, leaving Mr Ganji in no doubt that his life was in danger.  He is in a different category from the other targets of the serial killers, however, in that he was never among the political opponents of the regime.

The Iranian Human Rights Working Group drew particular attention to the similarity between the latest wave of killings and disappearances, and a previous series of killings in 1996-97.  On October 24, 1995, the body of writer and translator Ahmad Mir Ala’ee was found in an alleyway near his bookshop in Isfahan “under suspicious circumstances”. The official post-mortem gave heart attack as the cause of death, but private doctors who examined the body said that there were marks appearing to be those of injections on it. Mir Ala’ee had recently started a publication, Zayandehrood, and had been summoned to the security forces’ office in Isfahan. His family had been ordered not to say anything about the call . The following month another writer, Ghaffar Hosseini was found dead. In February 1997, Professor Ahmad Tafazzoli was found dead next to his parked car, and in March, the body of Ebrahim Zalzadeh was discovered, stabbed to death, a month after he had been reported missing. Ms Ghazaleh Alizadeh, a novelist, was found strangled in a wood near her home in northern Iran on May 11, 1996.  The official cause of her death was suicide, but colleagues believed that she was murdered by the state.  She was a militant writer who opposed despotism, and in the past had been detained and tortured.  The evening before her death she had traveled out from the city of Mashad in good shape .  Hosseini, Mir Ala’ee and Ms Alizadeh, like recent victims Mokhtari and Pouyandeh, were among the 134 writers and intellectuals who signed the October 1994 Tehran Declaration on freedom of expression.

Ms Fatemeh Ghaem-Maghami, a senior air hostess, was killed on December 25, 1997, with a single bullet. Just before her death she had been talking to Saeed Emami, the alleged ringleader of the death squad, for an hour.  It is said that she had an illicit relation with Ali Fallahian, the Minister of Intelligence, and had obtained some information, which would be devastating to Fallahian and Sa’eed Emami.  She was married to Bijan Jaffarzadeh and had three children.

Houshang Golshiri, Kazem Kardavani and Ali Ashraf Darvishiyan, the surviving three members of the six who were questioned in October 1998 about their plan to form an independent writers’ group, were among those who feared they might be the next to “disappear”, and concern for their safety was expressed by Amnesty International.
To be continued...