On July 28, 1988 Khomeini issued his decree for brutal massacre of thousands of imprisoned PMOI members and sympathizers. In summer 1988, fearful of being overthrown by the National Liberation Army because of great operations of NLA, Khomeini submitted to a ceasefire with Iraq which was a “chalice of poison“for Khomeini. In revenge to that, Khomeini demonstrated an unprecedented aspect of his brutality by issuing the order to massacre the PMOI and resistant prisoners.

According to the eye-witnesses who were released from prison later on, the grounds for this horrible atrocity were prepared since early 1988 along with the increasing fear of Khomeini of being overthrown by the PMOI and the National Liberation Army, and was carried after the ceasefire and the operation “Eternal Light” of the NLA, and continued ceaselessly in all prisons across the country.

Although the exact number of victims is not accessible, however the estimates indicate that the number of executed prisoners exceeds 30,000.

It is worth noting that Montazeri, then substitute of Khomeini, wrote a letter to Khomeini at the beginning of massacres in which he described the extent of massacres as” thousands per day”. Thereafter the massacre machine of Khomeini continued and still it the news of continuance of those massacres was received up until early 1989.

The extensive dimensions of those massacres created some reactions within the Khomeini regime and in order to keep his regime in power, Khomeini even paid the price for that evil decision with dismissal of Montazeri, his own substitute.

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) has managed to gather and publish the names of 3210 of 30,000 massacred political prisoners who were martyred by Khomeini regime in 1988.