(10 Aug 2021) An Iranian citizen went on trial in Stockholm on Tuesday charged with committing grave war crimes and murder during the final phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
The trial of Hamid Nouri comes just days after Iran's hardline President Ebrahim Raisi took office as the highest-ranking civilian leader in Iran.
Raisi himself took part as a prosecutor in the so-called "death commission" that executed as many as 5,000 people at the end of Iran's bloody war with Iraq in 1988.
According to the Swedish prosecutors, Nouri worked in July-August 1988 as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor in the Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj and allegedly carried out atrocities there.
They said Iran's then supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued an order for the execution of all prisoners in Iranian prisons who sympathized with and remained loyal to the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK.
Due to that order, a large number of prisoners were executed in the Gohardasht prison between July 30 and August 16, 1988, the prosecutors in Sweden said.
They said Hamid "participated in mass executions and is suspected of having intentionally deprived the lives of a very large number of prisoners who sympathized with the Mujahedin."
A group of members of the MEK showed up at the district court in Stockholm.
A spokesman of the national council of resistance of Iran called it a "landmark case which has been brought before the court after 33 years."
As for the murder charge, Swedish prosecutors said Hamid is suspected of "intentionally killing, together with other perpetrators, a large number of prisoners who sympathized with various left wing groups and who were regarded as apostates."
Under the Swedish Penal Code, these are not considered to be related to an armed conflict, the prosecution said.
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