In a bid to remove the traces of the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, the ‎regime decided to destroy the victims’ mass graves in Khavaran Cemetery in East
Tehran.‎
The mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ah Khamenei ordered then mayor and later President ‎Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to prepare the plan for destruction of the mass graves under the ‎guise of “developing” the area.‎
Tehran Municipality sent a number of its agents to begin implementing the plan in summer ‎‎2005, but they met protests by the victims’ families at the cemetery.‎
Given that the vast majority of the massacred prisoners were buried in mass graves without ‎their names and graves being identified, such a change would practically mean destroying the ‎graves and wiping out any signs of the slain victims, one of the most obvious crimes against ‎humanity.‎
Then President and now Supreme Leader Khamenei was among the principal leaders who ‎directed the enforcement of Khomeini’s fatwa for the massacre of political prisoners and ‎dissidents. Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, then Deputy Intelligence Minister, ‎was one of the three members of the “Death Commission” which ordered the executions of ‎group after group of prisoners.‎
On August 30, 2005 the National Council of Resistance of Iran called on the United ‎Nations Secretary General, High Commissioner on Human Rights and the Human Rights ‎Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Executions to take urgent steps to prevent the ‎destruction of Khavaran Cemetery. It also urged them to send a delegation to Iran to specify ‎the names and graves of the victims, emphasizing that the criminal mullahs must not be ‎allowed to destroy the documents and evidence of their crimes against humanity with ‎impunity.‎