There are numerous indications that the policy to exterminate political prisoners had been in the pipelines for a long time. In March 1988, Massoud Moqbeli, a Mojahedin sympathizer, was taken from Evin to Komiteh Moshtarak Prison in Tehran. There he was warned by prison authorities that “we are going to settle scores with all of you in a bloody way. Telic your fellow inmates they had better make up their minds.”
An ex-political prisoner recalls the days preceding the launch of the massacre: “The early signs of the regime’s decision to liquidate political prisoners surfaced in the autumn of 1987 when prisoners were separated into two groups of Mojahedin and non-Mojahedin. In Gohardasht Prison, those condemned to life imprisonment were transferred to Evin and the rest were divided into two groups of under- and over-ten-year terms. Families of some prisoners were told that the prisoners’ fate would be decided after June.”
Another prisoner wrote, “When it was announced that Khomeini had accepted the ceasefire with Iraq on July 18, 1988 and described it as ‘drinking a chalice of poison,’ they took us with all our belongings to solitary cells. The trend of transferring prisoners to solitary cells was accelerated on July 24, a week before the massacre began. On July 25 or 26, a prison guard came to our cell and gave us a form to fill in. I was sharing the cell with Reza Shemirani and Amir Abdullahi Lakelayeh who were later executed during the massacre. The form asked one’s name, surname, father’s name, political tendency, whether one had been re-arrested and one’s signature. In a highly unusual way, the guard did not utter a word and left us to fill in the forms. We wrote ‘Mojahedin Organization’ as our ‘tendency.’ When the guard returned, we were even more surprised as he asked us why we had not written the name of the organization in full. (Up to that time, if a prisoner mentioned the name ‘Mojahedin,’ he or she would be severely tortured.) So we wrote ‘People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran’ and handed him the completed forms. He smiled and walked out.”