The secret burial took place despite 164 days of follow up by representatives and lawyers of Camp Liberty residents, human rights defenders, and the families of the victims.
Iraqi government forces stormed Camp Ashraf, home to Iranian dissidents for 25 years on September 1, and executed 52 of the defenseless residents — protected persons according to Geneva Conventions — and took seven, including six as hostage.
Residents’ representatives had earlier obtained information about this secret burial. An Iraqi officials confirmed the burial in a meeting on February 11 meeting with the dissidents’ representatives, but they offered no information about the time and place of the burial.
Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, declared: “The clandestine burial of the bodies of the martyrs at an unspecified time and an undisclosed location in the absence of members of their families, as well as the absence and even knowledge of the UN representative who had officially received the bodies of the martyrs in Ashraf on September 2, was carried out to destroy the evidence and save the murderers from a trial and punishment for crime against humanity. This is bare proof of the Iraqi government’s complete responsibility for crime against humanity in Ashraf.”
“This infamous and anti-human act reminds of the massacre of political prisoners by Khomeini’s decree back in 1988 and their secret overnight burial in mass graves,” Mrs. Rajavi elaborated.
Mrs. Rajavi once again stressed the need for an independent international investigation by the International Criminal Court into the massacre, mass execution, and hostage-taking in Ashraf and called for the referral of the case to this court by the United Nations Security Council.
Iraqi Prime Minsiter Nouri-al Maliki is attempting to destroy the evidence of crime against humanity because of growing international consensus that Maliki was responsible for the massacre. That view is shared in the European Parliament, in the U.S. House and Senate, by six specialist organs of the UN, by the Spanish Court, by organizations that defend the human rights such as the Amnesty International, and by a large number of prominent international personalities.
