After nine tense months, and plenty of ups and downs, 60-year-old Hamid Noury was finally convicted for deliberately participating in the murder and execution of many political prisoners in Iran during the massacre in the infamous bloody summer of 1988. Ninety-two hearings were held with 60 plaintiffs and witnesses, along with 12 experts in the field of international law, history, Islamic jurisprudence, and psychology, who all helped finalize this verdict.
Noury’s unprecedented trial was supposed to end by April 2022, but due to several interruptions, and the prolongation of some sessions, his trial lasted until May 4. This court is now considered an important milestone in the Justice Movement, introduced for the first time in 2016 by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council Resistance of Iran (NCRI), because for the first time ever, someone accused of participating in the massacre of prisoners has been tried and convicted by a European court.
During the long sessions of his trial, thousands of pages of documents, evidence, reports from human rights organizations, memoirs of former political prisoners and survivors’ families, speeches, and letters of former and current heads of the Iranian regime in conforming this crime, and of course, the shocking testimonies of 60 witnesses and plaintiffs, were all thoroughly examined.
From the moment of his arrest, Hamid Noury had 34 interrogation sessions with the Swedish police before he was given seven days to defend himself in court. Noury emphasized in all these court hearings that he only worked in the administrative and judicial department of Evin prison from 1981 to 1993. Contrary to his denials and that of his lawyers, there are many documents that show that he was transferred from Evin prison to Gohardasht prison (Rajaishahr) in 1986.
In addition to the testimony of many plaintiffs and witnesses, and the books and memoirs of political prisoners that were cited in the court, the ‘Research Office of Kayhan Institute’, close to the office of the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, published a book called ‘Freedom from Illusion’ in 2007. In this book, it is mentioned that in 1986, the infamous criminal judge Mohammad Mughiseh, aka Naserian, was transferred to Gohardasht prison as a prosecutor and had an assistant named ‘Abbasi’, an alias of Hamid Noury.
This document, and many others that were presented in the court, showed that Hamid Noury was transferred to Gohardasht prison in the same year, and this is consistent with the memories of the prisoners and the testimony of many plaintiffs in the court.
During the proceedings, the court accepted only those plaintiffs who were in Gohardasht prison during the massacre in 1988.
It is common knowledge that at the time of the massacre, there were hundreds of official and unofficial prisons and safe houses in hundreds of cities that were involved in the executions. Therefore, this court has covered the entire scope of the massacre.
In addition to those who were in Gohardasht prison and passed through the death corridor, first-degree relatives such as brothers and sisters of those who were killed during the massacre in Gohardasht prison were accepted as plaintiffs during the sessions of Noury’s trial.
Therefore, among the thousands of victims of the regime’s prisons, a very limited number have been accepted. That is probably because the dimensions of the crime were only regarding one of the regime’s operatives, one prison, and only about the crimes committed in 1988 and from 1980 to 1988 when many more political prisoners were tortured and executed by the regime.
This is just the beginning of a long journey to seek justice, and now the main demand of the Iranian people is the prosecution of the main perpetrators involved in this crime, especially the members of the so-called death commission, in which the current president of the regime Ebrahim Raisi was a member.
This must be considered a great victory for the Iranian Resistance, because, with its 33-month campaign, it defeated the regime’s MOIS and its foreign agents, and their attempts to minimize and discredit the victims of this crime and the Iranian Resistance’s narrative about this massacre. If it were not for this campaign, the massacre would have been lost in history, and no one would have remembered it.
