Hamid Nouri denied the existence of the Khavaran cemetery in the 1967 massacre trial.

Hamid Nouri, accused of participating in the executions of the summer of 2018, denied the existence of mass graves in Khavaran during the fifth session of his defense in Hall 37 of the Stockholm Courthouse in Sweden, claiming that Khavaran does not exist.

He called Khavaran a "liar" and a "fabrication" and claimed that the communists had fabricated the story.

Mr. Nouri claimed that he had not heard anything about this while he was in Iran and that he heard about Khavarn after his arrest.

At the morning court session on Wednesday, December 1, he also confirmed that the bodies of the executed were not being handed over to their families, and claimed that the execution unit did not know about the bodies of those executed because their families did not follow the rules and buried them themselves.

The Khavaran Cemetery in eastern Tehran is a tangible symbol of the confiscation of bodies and the destruction of graves; mass graves and a cemetery that is known as a symbol of those executed in the 1960s, and a number of Baha'is are also buried there.

Security officials in the Islamic Republic continue to prevent the families of the victims from attending the cemetery and impose many restrictions in this regard .

According to the accounts of families and survivors of the executions of the 1960s, the bodies of the executed and political opponents were buried en masse in Khavaran, which was named Lanatabad by the government.

Hamid Nouri is accused of participating in the mass executions of political prisoners in Rajai Shahr Prison (Gohardasht), an accusation he denies and claims that he was in Evin Prison from 1982 to 1993.

He arrived at Stockholm Airport on November 9, 2019, on a direct flight from Iran and was immediately arrested.

In Wednesday's session, Manouchehr Eshaghi was supposed to speak as a witness and plaintiff, according to the court's previous announcement, but based on the judge's decision, an extraordinary session was dedicated to Hamid Nouri's defense. The prosecutor had said in the previous session that he had many questions for Hamid Nouri.

The hearing on Thursday, December 1, will be dedicated to Hamid Nouri's defense and questions from the plaintiffs' lawyers and witnesses, according to the court judge.

In a court hearing on Wednesday, Hamid Nouri denied the execution of communists, claiming that in Iran no one cares about anyone's personal beliefs. He referred to the verse "There is no compulsion in religion" and denied executing prisoners for their beliefs.

He also accused Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, then deputy to Ayatollah Khomeini, of “lying” and called the audio file of his meeting with members of the death squad a “fabrication.” He claimed that his (Ayatollah Montazeri) speech was like shaking a pebble in a can and that the file was “fabricated.”

On August 9, 2016, Ayatollah Montazeri's Telegram channel released an audio file from the late religious authority's August 14, 2018 meeting with four judicial officials at the time, in which Ayatollah Montazeri addresses them and says, "The biggest crime that has been committed in the Islamic Republic since the beginning of the revolution has been committed by you. In the future, you will be remembered as one of the criminals of history."

Hamid Nouri said that Montazeri has stepped off the revolutionary train and has no credibility with the Iranian people. He also rejected Ayatollah Montazeri's interviews about the executions, saying that "the speeches of a counter-revolutionary and anti-Imam have no value."

He called the death squad Montazeri's self-made squad and claimed that he had lived with Ayatollah Montazeri for 20 years. He claimed that Ayatollah Montazeri's voice was such that "people made fun of him and gave him ugly names."

In response to the prosecutor's question, he said that in 1988, he formed the "Marivan Front and War Support Headquarters" with a number of other soldiers, and that he himself was in charge of this headquarters, and that he had also met with Ayatollah Montazeri in this regard.

Hamid Nouri, who, according to the plaintiffs, was the former deputy prosecutor of Gohardasht Prison during the executions, denied the executions of the summer of 2018 for the umpteenth time and called the witnesses and plaintiffs in the court liars.

This is despite the fact that one of the perpetrators of the executions, Ebrahim Raisi, who was a member of the death squad, said after the 1400 presidential election that he should be "appreciated and encouraged" regarding the executions of 1967.

Mustafa Pourmohammadi, another member of the committee, said in September 2016 that he acted in accordance with the law and Islamic Sharia regarding the executions of the 1960s and that he had not lost a single sleepless night during these years.

Hamid Nouri, during the court session, said about the sermons of the Friday prayer on August 4, 1988, which were presented in court by the plaintiffs and witnesses, that Mousavi Ardebili, the preacher of this Friday prayer, did not say that all the Mujahideen should be executed.

In response to the prosecutor's question, he denied the statements made by some of the plaintiffs in previous court hearings that they had seen him on the street after the executions, saying: "They said they saw me and I was scared. Is someone who goes to Evin Prison at the age of 21 a coward? Can someone who goes to fight in Kurdistan at the age of 19 be a coward?"

Majid Jamshidit, as a witness and plaintiff in previous court hearings, had said that when he accidentally saw Hamid Nouri on Abbasabad Street in Tehran in 1974 or 1975, Nouri told him in embarrassment that he no longer worked in the prison: "In prison, they felt very powerful, but outside of prison, they felt afraid and maybe even ashamed. He immediately came to me and said that he no longer worked in the prison and was working in the mine."

Mohammad Zand, as a plaintiff and witness, said that after his release from prison, he was a passenger peddler and that he saw Hamid Nouri in Tehran's Azadi Square: "I was a passenger peddler. Hamid Abbasi (Nouri) said Karaj. I stopped. He came in front of the car and when he saw me, he regretted it and said he didn't want to. Because he recognized me. I recognized him too."

Hamid Nouri questioned the audio tape attributed to Nasserian (Mohammad Moghiseh), which was recently presented to the court as evidence by the MEK.

Thousands of political prisoners were executed in the 1960s, especially in the summer of 1988, in Evin and Gohardasht prisons in Tehran and prisons in Mashhad, Shiraz, Ahvaz, and some other cities in Iran, on the direct orders of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Republic at the time, and by the decisions of committees that became known as death committees.

Many of those executed were supporters of the People's Mojahedin Organization (PMOI), and a number of others were supporters of leftist groups who had been imprisoned in the early 1960s.

Due to the Iranian government's secrecy, there are no exact statistics on these executions, but according to a report by Amnesty International, at least 4,482 men and women disappeared in the space of two months.

In a previous court hearing, Hamid Nouri denied Ayatollah Khomeini's "fatwa" regarding political prisoners in 1988 and claimed that this phrase was "forged."

In 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini explicitly stated in an official letter: “Those who have persisted in their hypocritical stance in prisons across the country are considered enemies and sentenced to death, and the decision on the matter in Tehran will be made by a majority vote of Mr. Hojjatoleslam Nairi… (Shariah Judge) and Mr. Eshraqi (Tehran Prosecutor) and a representative from the Ministry of Intelligence…”

In this ruling, the former leader of the Islamic Republic also referred to the prisons in provincial capitals and wrote that in these centers, "the majority vote of the religious judge, the revolutionary prosecutor, or the deputy prosecutor, and the representative of the Ministry of Intelligence is mandatory. Mercy is for the naive Muharebeen. The gentlemen who are responsible for determining the issue should not be tempted, doubt, or hesitate, and try to be the strongest against the infidels. Hesitation in the judicial matters of revolutionary Islam is ignoring the pure and innocent blood of the martyrs."

The trial of Hamid Nouri, which will continue until April of next year, 2022, in the Stockholm Court of Sweden, has also prompted a reaction from the Islamic Republic's authorities.

As Hamid Nouri's defense hearings begin, two people from the Iranian Embassy in Sweden are also present at the court hearings, although they are not sitting in the main courtroom but in another room, following Nouri's defense.

Saeed Khatibzadeh, spokesman for the Islamic Republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Mr. Nouri's trial "a design" by the People's Mojahedin Organization on September 1, claiming that the Swedish court "based on a series of stories, documentation, and false witness statements, all carried out by a small group."

Source: Radio Farda