Mullah Ahmad Jannati, head of the clerical regime’s Guardian Council, demanded in today’s Friday prayers sermon the speedy implementation of execution sentences handed down to political prisoners, in particular members of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI).
While warning of the Mojahedin’s “seditious actions and plans to overthrow the government,” he said, “Some of them have full judicial cases against them to the extent that no lawyer could defend them, and any judge would hand down a death sentence to them. Some of them have already been sentenced, and their sentences upheld during appeals.”
Jannati’s remarks that “no lawyer could defend them, and any judge would hand down a death sentence to them” echo Khomeini’s fatwa regarding members and sympathizers of the PMOI. The fatwa stated that all members and sympathizers of the PMOI should automatically be sentenced to execution. Mullah Mohammad Yazdi, the former head of the judiciary, announced that this fatwa defined the judiciary’s approach to PMOI members and supporters.
The call for execution and brutal suppression, coming a day after a National Convention of Iranians-Americans in the U.S. took place in support of the Iranian Resistance, indicates the ruling religious dictatorship’s fear of the resistance’s progress.
State-run media, including state-radio and television, have reacted sharply over the past week to the call in the U.S. Congress for the removal of the PMOI from the list of terrorist organization.
In a commentary on Monday, Tehran radio said, “To remove the [PMOI] from the list of terrorist organizations, the U.S. State Department first needs to make preparations … It is trying to bring in the [Mojahedin] to use them as part of a political conspiracy, against the Islamic Republic.”
The Iranian Resistance calls on international human rights authorities and organizations to protest against the death threats against members and sympathizers of the Mojahedin from the clerical regime’s official tribunes, and urges them to intervene immediately to save the lives of political prisoners in Iran.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
April 15, 2005