Amnesty International: Preserve the Khavaran grave site for investigation into mass killings

Last month, the Iranian authorities began bulldozing the site of mass graves in the district of Khavaran in southeast Tehran, planning to turn it into a public park.
They have already covered a large area with soil - having possibly removed bones - and planted rows of trees.
In these unmarked graves lie thousands of political prisoners killed by the Islamic regime in the 1980s- most of them during
a secret mass massacre in the summer of 1988.Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to "immediately stop the destruction of hundreds of individual and mass, unmarked graves in Khavaran, south Tehran, to ensure that the site is preserved and to initiate a forensic investigation into the site as part of a long-overdue thorough, independent and impartial investigation into mass executions which began in 1988."


Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to "immediately stop the destruction of hundreds of individual and mass, unmarked graves in Khavaran, south Tehran, to ensure that the site is preserved and to initiate a forensic investigation into the site as part of a long-overdue thorough, independent and impartial investigation into mass executions which began in 1988."

Iranian human rights advocates, including Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, have also condemned the destruction of the graves. The Centre for the Defence of Human Rights, headed by Ebadi, issued a statement recently condemning "this ugly and appalling act and (noting) that everyone, including the authorities is required to maintain the dignity of the dead," according to Agence France-Presse.