Swedish trial raises awkward questions for Iran’s new president

STOCKHOLM — Iraj Mesdaghi, a former political prisoner in one of Iran’s most notorious jails, thinks he has found one of his captors. 

On Tuesday, that alleged jailer, Hamid Noury, will appear in a Stockholm courtroom accused of playing a key role in the execution of scores of dissidents — as well as the torture of Mesdaghi and many others — at the Gohardasht prison, outside Iran’s capital Tehran, in a 1988 purge.

“Noury had an active role in that massacre,” Mesdaghi said. “I saw him, I know him well.”

Noury denies the charges.

The trial has been headline news in Sweden because of the seriousness of the charges that Noury faces — “gross crimes against international law and murder” — and its scale: the police case documents name 38 plaintiffs and the main hearing is expected to continue until April 2022 with three sessions a week.

The case also promises to offer a rare insight into atrocities allegedly committed by the Iranian state during one the darkest periods in its modern history — summer 1988 — when reports by human rights organizations say thousands of members of political opposition groups were executed on the orders of supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini. 

The case is particularly sensitive for Iran now because its new president, Ebrahim Raisi, has long stood accused of being a central figure in the massacre, as a member of a committee that ruled who should be killed and who should be spared during the purge. 

International organizations have long pressed Iran to address this murky chapter in its past, something Tehran has resisted. 

But now, an international legal principle known as universal jurisdiction — which permits one state to try cases of serious alleged criminality in another — has given Sweden an opportunity to take its own look.

In 2019, Swedish police arrested Noury as he landed in Stockholm for a family visit. 

Since then, Mesdaghi and other witnesses have come forward to say Noury — then known by the name Hamid Abassi — worked as an assistant prosecutor at Gohardasht overseeing beatings and executions. 

“I witnessed what happened,” Mesdaghi said. “I was blindfolded, but I could see from behind the blindfold.”

A bloody history

Mesdaghi, like Noury and Raisi, is 60 years old, meaning all three were young men when Khomeini led the revolution that overthrew Iran’s former leader, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

Mesdaghi was studying in the U.S. city of San Diego in the years before the revolution but returned to join a group that opposed Khomeini called the People’s Mujahedin. He was arrested in 1981 and jailed for 10 years. Mesdaghi said he was often tortured in jail. Among other things, he was made to sit blindfolded on the floor for whole days while loudspeakers blasted him with sound. He was held in solitary confinement for long periods, he said, but could sometimes maintain contact with other political prisoners by tapping on pipes that ran between the cells. 

In 1988, as Iran’s bloody eight-year war with Iraq was grinding to a stalemate, Khomeini issued an order calling for new judgments on political prisoners, especially members of the People’s Mujahedin, which had sided with Iraq during the conflict. 

Mesdaghi said he was moved to what inmates called “death corridor,” a series of cells at Gohardasht leading to a kind of amphitheater. Prisoners were regularly taken from their cells to hearings and then to the amphitheater where they were executed by hanging, Mesdaghi and other witnesses said.

New President Raisi was long silent about his role in these hearings, but in recent years he has sought to defend the 1988 crackdown, albeit in vague language.

“If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised … I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far,” Raisi said when asked about allegations that he was involved in the killings, according to Reuters.

Swedish prosecutors allege that Noury was a key underling in the team that ran the day-to-day process of hearings and killings at Gohardasht.

In an interview with police after his arrest, he said his detention was a case of mistaken identity.

“I don’t understand what you are talking about,” he told police. “You are making a mistake, there has been a misunderstanding, you have the wrong man.” 

Mesdaghi was released from jail in 1991 and fled to Sweden via Turkey with his wife and young son in 1994. 

In the years since, he has compiled thousands of pages detailing his experiences and listing the names of the people at whose hands he suffered, hoping that one day the information could be used in court. 

At 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday, 30 years after Mesdaghi was released from Gohardasht, that hope looks set to be fulfilled when Noury’s trial begins in room 37 of Stockholm’s district court. 

“This crime happened in Iran, in my native country, and we could not get justice over there,” Mesdaghi said. “Sweden is my second country, we will have justice here, and I am very happy about that.”