Iran’s supreme leader didn’t spare women and children when he ordered the industrial slaughter of 30,000 prisoners during a two-month purge of terror.
Ayatollah Khomeini – Iran’s supreme leader from 1979 until his death in 1989 – issued a Fatwa in 1988 saying political prisoners who were steadfast in their support for rival parties were “waging war on God and are condemned to execution.”
The Fatwa – a religious decree issued by senior Muslim clerics – was similar to the one issued against British-Indian author Salman Rushdie in 1989.
Rushdie – whose book The Satanic Verses sparked fury in the Muslim world – was stabbed in the neck by an alleged Iran-fanatic in New York last week.
Reports of blood-stained Khomeini’s involvement in the 1988 massacre was originally detailed in the memoirs of his crony Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri – who eventually repented after realising the horror of what his leader had done.
During the massacre, a so-called Death Committee loaded political inmates from across the country’s prisons onto forklift trucks six at a time, attached them to cranes and hung them by the necks.
Because of the sheer volume of prisoners, a batch of the condemned was slaughtered every 30 minutes in a rotating wheel of death.
Within two weeks of the Fatwa being issued, the Death Committee had slaughtered 8,000 Iranians, including women and children.
The panel – which was made up of a sharia judge, intelligence ministry official, and a civil prosecutor – made the decision of who should be killed.
They would interrogate the inmates about where their loyalties lie, and whether they were faithful to the Islamic Republic and its blood-stained leader.
