“The executions are aimed at creating a republic of fear in which the people don’t dare to protest and the officials don’t dare to defect,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group think-tank’s Iran Project Director.
Then, in a few weeks following the July ceasefire which ended eight years of war with Iraq, Iranian authorities conducted secret mass executions of thousands of imprisoned dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic. Raisi, then deputy prosecutor general for Tehran, was a member of the capital’s death committee, according to Amnesty.Human Rights Watch, in a report published last year, quoted a prisoner saying he saw Raisi at a prison outside Tehran and that Raisi would go to the execution site to ensure the process was carried out correctly.
As a young student at a religious seminary in the central holy city of Qom, he joined protests against the Western-backed Shah in the 1979 revolution. Later his contacts with religious leaders in Qom made him a trusted figure in the judiciary. In the recording, the late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, then deputy supreme leader, spoke of the killings. Montazeri’s son was arrested and jailed for releasing the tape.
Khamenei, not the president, has the final say on all major policy under Iran’s dual political system split between the Shi’ite clerical establishment and the government.But his hardline stance, closely aligned with Khamenei, helped guide policy abroad as well as at home.
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