The jurist Abdulkarim Lahiji, who has followed the regime’s record of executions, says most former revolutionaries including Islamic liberals or socialists, who now reject the regime and its ways, had an early role in turning executions into a tool of government.
A member of the National Front, a secular party formed in the mid-20th century, Lahiji says not only the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but other clerics, Islamists and “all revolutionary groups, including the Left and the Mujahedin” approved the executions. He was referring to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a Marxist group that fell afoul of the ayatollahs and ultimately saw many of its own members shot in prison in 1988.
Sadiq Khalkhali was a junior cleric and gun-toting prosecutor for the regime in its early days. Once retired, he wrote in his memoirs that Iran’s new rulers believed that without use of…
