At the end of 1998, the Iranian public was horrified and amazed by the brutal murders of four prominent intellectuals, later to be described in the Iranian media as the “chain murders”.

The first to die were Dariush Forouhar, the 70-year-old leader of the Iran People’s Party, and his 54-year-old wife Parvaneh. Outspoken but apparently tolerated critics of the Iranian régime, they were stabbed to death on Sunday November 22, 1998 in their Tehran flat, on the anniversary of the suspicious death of Dr Kazem Sami, another dissident, in 1989. Mr Forouhar was decapitated, and one of Parvaneh’s breasts had been cut off.  The barbaric mutilation of the corpses was reminiscent of the killing of Dr Shapour Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last Prime Minister, whose head and hands were cut off by the murderers - agents of the Iranian regime's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) - who killed him at his Paris home in August 1991.

Forouhar’s flat was under surveillance and therefore every move was being recorded. How could the murderers have penetrated this permanent intelligence cordon and then escaped without being noticed? The likeliest explanation, in the light of subsequent developments, is that the murderers were known to the authorities, who deliberately took no action. A news agency told the story:

“Friends who called on Dariush Forouhar and his wife one afternoon in late November grew worried when no one answered the doorbell for hours.  Since the husband and wife had the flu, it was odd for them to be out for so long.  Then a close friend climbed over the iron gate of the house to see if all was well.  He came out running, his face ashen.  The couple, longtime critics of the Iranian government, had been slain”.

“Forouhar had been stabbed some 15 times in the heart with a knife.  His blood-soaked body was slumped behind a desk.  His wife, Parvaneh, also stabbed to death, was dressed as if she was just about to go out or had just come home”.

“There was no sign of burglary.  It seemed like a professional killing.  Both husband and wife had been sprayed with some unknown substance, knocking them out so they couldn’t scream for help.  The slayings were chilling in their familiarity: Nine political activists whose actions angered Iran’s clerical rulers have been killed over the past decade, at least half stabbed to death like the Forouhars”.

“They include a Tehran University professor, a magazine editor, a publisher, three Christian priests and two Sunni Muslim preachers who spoke out against Iran’s Shiite Muslim leaders”.

The next to die was Mohammad Mokhtari, a poet and one of the group of six writers questioned in connection with the writers’ association “Kanoun”. His body was found in a morgue on December 9, after he had been missing for six days.  Marks on his head and neck suggested he might have been strangled. Mokhtari had contributed to many liberal newspapers, and was well known as a critic of the regime.  He had been arrested several times by the security forces.  In 1994, he was one of the 134 intellectuals who signed a manifesto demanding freedom of speech .

The fourth victim was Mohammad Pouyandeh, an essayist and translator of French literature, found dead on December 11, 1998.  He had disappeared after leaving his office at about 14.00 on December 9 for a meeting of publishers in downtown Tehran.  His body was found underneath a railway bridge in a suburb of Tehran and according to his family, he had apparently been strangled, though no autopsy was carried out.  His family were not informed of the death until December 13.  Pouyandeh was also one of six writers questioned in October when they formed the writers’ association “Kanoun ”.

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.

In the face of public and international pressure, on December 14, 1998, President Mohammad Khatami announced the establishment of a special committee to investigate the killings, but before the inquiry even began, apparently the régime’s leaders already knew the answers.  President Khatami said: “These murders are ominous schemes of the enemies of independence and freedom of the Islamic state.

Hojatoleslam Qorbanali Dorri Najafabadi, then Intelligence Minister, said: “These kinds of crimes are rooted abroad” and “the enemies” want to create “turmoil” and “unrest” in the country and portray it as “crisis-riddled”.

“This network is located abroad”, Judiciary spokesman Fotovat Savadkouhi chimed in, and was one of the first to accuse the People’s Mojahedin of Iran of involvement in the conspiracy, a tactic routinely used by the régime to deflect criticism.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic said the killings “complement the other conspiracies by the World Arrogance (the pejorative term normally used for the United States) ”. A few days later, the Director of the Islamic Propaganda Organisation stated as a fact: “These murders were carried out by the Zionists with the cooperation of the Mojahedin group ”.

Less than a month later, however, the committee appointed by President Khatami disclosed that 10 Intelligence Ministry employees had been arrested and many more were under surveillance. The committee said it had concrete information on the slayings that could not be disclosed without hurting the investigation.

Leading the Friday prayers on January 8, the Supreme Leader staked his name and prestige on the allegation that foreign elements were involved: “With all my long experience at the helm of the state and all the information in my possession, I cannot accept that these dirty, disgusting and hateful assassinations that have harmed the system, the government, the nation and the people, are written without a foreign scenario”.

Specifically mentioning the CIA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, he said: “You will be shocked to learn about the scope of the crimes, assassinations, bombings and intimidations committed by these intelligence services”.

“I don’t think the issue is over.  This seems to be a long story,’’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told worshipers during a prayer sermon at Tehran University.

To accommodate the earlier version of the story, the Ministry of Intelligence admitted that the murders were committed by some of its agents, but claimed that these individuals were in league with the foreign elements mentioned previously. The public relations department of the Intelligence Ministry declared that, “with utmost deep regret, a number of our irresponsible and selfish colleagues at the Ministry, who were no doubt in contact with foreign intelligence services, have committed these crimes”.

This was the main theme of the propaganda, even after, as will be seen, the Intelligence Ministry admitted that its own agents were the killers.  It was said that although the actual perpetrators had been identified, an extensive investigation was still under way to identify the foreign elements who were the masterminds behind the scenes. Mohsen Reza’i, former commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and now Secretary of the Council to Discern State Exigency, blamed Israeli agents and said: “They went up to an employee of the Intelligence Ministry and said to him that Daryoush Forouhar may lead a coup against the Islamic Republic”.

In January 1999, Hojatoleslam Mohammad Niazi, Head of the Judicial Organisation of the Armed Forces (JOAF), was put in charge of the investigation.  Karim Lahiji, President of the Paris-based Iranian League for the Defence of Human Rights, believed that the reason for transferring the case to the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces Judiciary, an unusual choice for a case involving no members of the Armed Forces, was to whitewash the issue.  He pointed out that dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar, and the editors of Hovviyat Khish, who drew attention to the fact that the murders were committed on the authority of fatwa issued by high-level religious personalities, had been detained.

In April, Niazi told Salam daily: “There are several items of evidence and indications pointing to the fact that foreign elements had infiltrated and were involved in these murders”. He was still peddling the same line a month later when he insisted that “There is evidence to prove that the serial murders could not have taken place without being guided by foreign elements”.  Responding indirectly to those who saw the chain murders as the work of “hard-liners only”, he added: “According to new information obtained, the perpetrators of these murders will be tried and punished. Those involved in this affair were of different political persuasions and were not related to any of the factions”.

In June, as speculation about the killings mounted, he stuck fast to the agreed line, and again tried to stop the rumours: “We hold proofs and confessions which point to foreign involvement in these murders…. We cannot provide any further information, as the investigations still go on”. He warned the newspapers not to create confusion and called on them to contain themselves, otherwise they will be warned once and then legal measures will be taken.

Ataollah Mohajerani, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Khatami government’s spokesman, parroted the line agreed upon by all the factions: “In general, these murders could not have taken place without foreign involvement”.

The banned daily Neshat which supported Khatami, wrote: “Regarding the identity of the perpetrators of recent murders, Gholamhossein Bolandian, Deputy Interior Minister, said that according to the information gathered during interrogations, it was clear that there were contacts with foreign elements who wanted to take advantage of the situation. He did not reply to a question asking him to name the country involved in these murders”.