Excerpts from the Memoirs of Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri
Khomeini’s decree on massacre of political prisoners in Iran

Q. It appears that Your Eminence wrote a letter to Imam Khomeini in connection with the ‎execution of the [Mojahedin] in prisons after the Monafeqin offensive into the Islamic ‎Republic, the Mersed or Eternal Light Operation. What was the situation and what made it ‎necessary to write the letter?‎

‎ Montazeri: …What prompted me to write the letter was that at the Time (in 1988) certain ‎people had decided to liquidate the Mojahedin and get rid of them once and for all. They ‎received a letter from the Imam stating that all individuals from the Mojahedin who had been ‎in prison from any time in the past must be executed if a majority of a three- man panel ‎composed of the prosecutor, the religious judge, and an Intelligence Ministry representative in ‎any area voted that the prisoner was holding firmly to his belief. In other words, if two out of ‎the three members of the panel thought that prisoner X was still supporting the Mojahedin, ‎even if he had been previously sentenced to one or two or five years or more in prison, he ‎must be executed. The Imam’s letter was undated, but it was written on a Thursday.‎
On Saturday, a religious judge brought me a copy and was extremely distressed. I read the ‎letter. It was very sharply written in response to the Mojahedin operation and it was said to be ‎in [Khomeini’s son] Haj Ahmad’s handwriting. As the letter was sent to all the judges in the ‎country, it is permissible to read it for you, so you can grasp the reality of the situation as it ‎was at that time:   ‎