According to an official announcement issued at the time by the then-Governor of Mahabad, Hamid Reza Jalaeipour, 59 citizens from Mahabad were executed on charges of connections with counter-revolutionary parties.
Based on investigations conducted by the Hana Human Rights Organization, these 59 Mahabad residents had been rounded up in mass arbitrary arrests by state forces between late 1982 and early 1983, and subsequently transferred to Orumiyeh Prison. These detentions were part of a broader, systemic campaign of repression unleashed across various Kurdish cities following Ayatollah Khomeini’s jihad fatwa against the people of Kurdistan.
As Kurdish political parties resisted the overwhelming violence deployed by invading state forces in the region, Mohammad Boroujerdi the then-commander of the IRGC’s Hamzah Headquarters was killed in a military clash with Kurdish forces. Available evidence and documentation indicate that state forces, driven by a desire for immediate retaliation, decided to execute a significant number of Kurdish political prisoners. Consequently, the 59 Mahabad citizens held in Orumiyeh Prison were transferred to the city of Tabriz. Deprived of all fundamental fair trial guarantees and legal defense rights, they were summarily sentenced to death by judges of the Tabriz Islamic Revolutionary Court. The verdicts were carried out immediately and in total secrecy.
According to recovered documents and the testimonies of the victims’ families, the vast majority of those executed were under the age of 18, legally classifying them as children at the time their lives were taken. The victims of this atrocity were denied the most elementary rights of an accused person, including access to independent legal counsel and legal advice. To this day, the Islamic Republic has never published a single document regarding their trials or the details of their execution. Despite decades of persistent tracking and inquiries across various state institutions, the families of the victims have been left with absolutely no information regarding the fate or burial location of their loved ones’ remains.
Under international criminal law, a mass execution of this nature characterized by a specific criminal intent and executed systematically by state authorities amounts to a crime against humanity. Furthermore, the ongoing refusal to return the bodies or disclose their burial sites constitutes a continuous and independent international crime. Among the perpetrators and commanders of this atrocity who remain alive today are Ebrahim Sanjaghi, a senior IRGC commander and the current head of Malek Ashtar University, and Hamid Reza Jalaeipour, the then-Governor and Chairman of the Mahabad Security Council. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, these individuals remain subject to prosecution in the courts of European states that have integrated this principle into their criminal codes.
The Hana Human Rights Organization expresses its deepest solidarity with the victims’ families and calls for the international prosecution of these individuals utilizing the principle of universal jurisdiction. Under this principle, states possess the jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute heinous crimes such as crimes against humanity, regardless of where the crime was committed or the nationality of the accused.
Names of the 59 Victims of the June 2, 1983 Mass Execution in Mahabad:
1 Ebrahim Amini
2 Aboubakar Shokri
3 Ahmad Karoubi
4 Abbas Hosseinpour
5 Abbas Yousefi
6 Abdullah Tahririan
7 Ali Abadeh
8 Ali Bazian
9 Ali Bonyan
10 Ali Salehi
11 Ali Qavareh
12 Ali Golparast
13 Ali Mazneh
14 Hamed Mahmoudkandi
15 Hasan Jahanian
16 Hasan Rahmanian
17 Hossein Kalhori
18 Khalegh Barzani
19 Khezr Rangin
20 Khaled Rahimi Azar
21 Khaled Safaei
22 Rahman Rahimi
23 Rahman Khezrpour
24 Saleh Farhoudi
25 Saleh Mamebrahimi
26 Siamak Saqqezi
27 Seyed Ebrahim Ahmadi
28 Seyed Mahmoud Seyed Mahmoudi
29 Soleiman Hasanzadeh
30 Shokri Naderi
31 Fereydoun Shangeh
32 Kamran Zaher Hejazi
33 Kazem Khatouni
34 Kamal Chavoshini
35 Kamal Karimi
36 Karim Kaveh
37 Karim Rahimian
38 Mashallah Naderi
39 Mohammad Aboubakri
40 Mohammad Amin Ahmadi
41 Mohammad Amin Safaei
42 Mohammad Alili
43 Mohammad Farough Bazyar
44 Mohammad Hosseini
45 Mohammad Salimi
46 Mohammad Masoudi
47 Mahmoud Riazi
48 Mostafa Esmaeili
49 Mostafa Feghri
50 Maghsoud Mahmoudi
51 Mansour Jenah
52 Mullah Hasan Lajevardi
53 Homayoun Niloufari
54 Vafa Elyasi
55 Hejar Karimi
56 Youssef Ayazi
57 Youssef Habibpanah
58 Youssef Hasanzadeh
59 Gholamreza Barzi
Hana Human Rights Organization
June 2, 2026