The trial in Sweden of Hamid Noury, an agent of the Iranian regime, ended on May 5th. The prosecutor told the court that there was plenty of evidence to show that Hamid Noury committed the crimes he had been charged with and she asked for him to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict is expected later. The court case in Stockholm has been a direct embarrassment to Iran’s executioner president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his hands-on role in the killing of thousands of political prisoners, including teenagers and even pregnant women, during a notorious massacre of more than 30,000, mostly supporters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), in 1988. Hamid Noury was one of Raisi’s key functionaries during the massacre and revealed Raisi’s role during his evidence. Noury, who was charged under universal jurisdiction, was arrested at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport in November 2019, after mistakenly believing he could dodge justice when he travelled to Europe.
The PMOI/MEK were outlawed and hunted down by the mullahs following the 1979 revolution in Iran, which saw the sociopathic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seize power as Supreme Leader. Khomeini issued a fatwa against the PMOI/MEK, instructing that all political prisoners who claimed allegiance to the organization must be executed. The mass hangings began in the summer of 1988. The Swedish authorities heard evidence that PMOI/MEK prisoners were executed between 30 July and 16 August 1988 in the Gohardasht prison in Karaj, Iran, where Noury was assistant to the deputy prosecutor – Ebrahim Raisi. The indictment stated that Noury was “suspected of participating, together with other perpetrators, in these mass executions and, as such, intentionally taking the lives of a large number of prisoners, who sympathized with the Mojahedin and, additionally, of subjecting prisoners to severe suffering which is deemed torture and inhuman treatment."
The Swedish prosecutors gathered extensive evidence from witnesses and survivors of the 1988 massacre, including murder and war crimes, which the 60-year-old denied. Witnesses told the court how Noury helped with the selection of PMOI/MEK prisoners who were brought before a summary court where they were asked simply if they still supported the main democratic opposition PMOI/MEK. If, during this two-minute hearing, they answered ‘yes,’ they were immediately led to the so-called ‘death corridor’ by Noury, where he would order them to stand in line, sometimes for hours, before escorting them to the execution chamber, where they would be made to watch other prisoners being hanged, before being executed themselves. He is believed to have often attended and participated in the hanging of prisoners. Grim evidence given during his trial revealed the true brutality of the Iranian regime. So many of the plaintiffs in the case now live in the PMOI/MEK’s main compound - Ashraf 3 in Albania, that the Swedish court, in an unprecedented move, relocated the entire trial to Durrës Province in Albania, for 10 days, to hear key witnesses to the killings. All six judges, two prosecutors, the translators and Noury’s lawyer travelled to Albania in November last year.
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The plaintiffs were mostly freed prisoners who witnessed the crimes committed in the death corridor in Gohardasht Prison during the 1988 massacre. One witness has described how he recalled Noury bringing a box of pastries to the death corridor on one of the days that dozens of executions were taking place. He took the pastries first to the room where Ebrahim Raisi was supervising the arbitrary death sentences for political prisoners. According to the witness, Raisi and his henchmen gorged themselves on pastries while sending innocent men and women to their deaths.
As the case closed on May 5th, Amir Abdollahian, the Iranian regime’s foreign minister, declared the court in Stockholm was not competent to issue a sentence and called for Hamid Noury's immediate release. He also summoned the Swedish ambassador in Tehran to receive the regime's severe objection to the indictment of Hamid Noury. Then, in an attempt to blackmail the Swedish government, the theocratic regime announced that the Iranian-Swedish dual national, Ahmad Reza Jalali, will be executed in 2 weeks-time. The Swedish foreign minister immediately telephoned Abdollahian to protest about this outrageous move. Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian physician, previously provided his academic services in a variety of European universities. He was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court in 2017 on the usual trumped up charges of spying for Israel. His imprisonment and sentence have been widely condemned by human rights organizations.
There is no doubt that the Swedish government must stand firm in the face of such provocation. Indeed, based on the witnesses they heard from during the trial of Hamid Noury, they have sufficient evidence under universal jurisdiction to indict the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, for crimes against humanity and genocide. He could be tried in absentia in a Swedish Court.
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