MEK rial The 25th court session was held to hear the charges against 104 members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), as well as the nature of this organization as a legal entity.
The 25th court session examining the charges against 104 high-ranking members of the MEK as well as the organization’s nature as a legal entity, was held in public on Tuesday at Branch 11 of the Criminal Court of Tehran province, presided by Judge Amir Reza Dehghani.
At the beginning of the session, Judge Dehghani asked the plaintiffs’ lawyer to take the stand and make his statements.
Lawyer Kazemi said: In the last session, we talked about a topic called “engineering operations”. After the measures taken in February 1981, a large number of team houses and high-ranking individuals of the organization were identified and arrested, the organization felt danger and accordingly sought a solution to stop this process. The members of the organization executed engineering operations. Engineering operations mean carrying out intelligence work so that they can understand the reason for the leaking in the organization, so they changed their approach from assassinating individuals to collecting information.
Kazemi added: “At first, they started collecting information from the people at the community level, but they found out that they were not getting any results, so they came to the conclusion that they would kidnap people who they thought were affiliated with the Islamic Republic and obtain information from them by torturing them to find out where they were being penetrated. This was considered the engineering operation.”
Kazemi continued: “Explanations were given in the previous session regarding the execution of the engineering operation and the crimes committed against Abbas Effat-Ravesh, one of the victims of the group. In this session, we will discuss the various aspects of the MEK’s acts of kidnapping, torturing, and assassinating two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Taleb Taheri and Mohsen Mirjalili, in the operation known as the Engineering Operation.”
He added: “According to the confessions of the arrested members of the NEK, the group’s central leadership, following the successive blows to the organization’s body that had led to the arrest of a large number of its members, and also in order to identify the perpetrators of the blows, took action to identify, kidnap, and torture individuals with religious appearances to gather information.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyer said: “The core members of the organization made sure that their team houses were ready for the purpose of torturing individuals, as well as providing them with the tools and equipment to torture. When they wanted to torture individuals, they would identify specific houses and equip them, for example, they would prepare a house so that no sound could escape from it.”
He quoted from an arrested member of the group, the defendant Mehran Asdaghi, one of the military commanders of the MEK at that time. In his statements justifying these actions, Asdaghi said that the regarding the announcement of the torture agenda by the group’s leaders and central cadres, the torture line was not separate from the rest of the organization’s agenda. It was a continuation of the same lines of conflicts after the 22th of July (the start of the group’s armed struggle against Islamic Republic), assassinations and burning of houses and killing of government officials, and ultimately this same process of torture.
Based on Asdaghi’s confessions, in their justifications, they said that we are torturing now, but when we come to power, we will no longer torture. In this regard, the members of the organization, taking up the torture line, attempted to kidnap Abbas Effat Ravesh, a shoemaker, Khosrow Riahi, a teacher, and three members of the Revolutionary Guards named Taleb Taheri, Mohsen Mirjalili, and Shahrokh Tahmasbi, arguing that these individuals had a religious appearance and so were probably trying to identify the organization’s team houses.
Kazemi added: On August 6, 1982, the two great martyrs Taleb Taheri and Mohsen Mirjalili, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Committee, were standing on Karun Street near a team house belonging to the group’s members. The team house security force became suspicious of them and, after coordinating with the headquarters, searched them on the street, then forced them into a car and transferred them to the team house where they were tortured.
The lawyer quoted the statements of the arrested defendants: Taleb Taheri and Mohsen Mirjalili were subjected to the most heinous tortures from the moment they arrived at this place, such as burning their bodies with an iron and boiling water, severe blows to the face and mouth, and teeth extraction by members of the organization. Then, when their torture failed, they were shot and killed by injecting cyanide into their bodies. Then, their bodies were wrapped in blankets and taken to Nizamabad and handed over to the defendant Khosrow Zandi, another member of the organization in the engineering department. They also transferred the bodies to a place in Bagh-e-Fayz that they had prepared in advance.
“The images of this incident are clear and will be made available to the court,” the lawyer said. According to these images, Taleb Taheri and Mohsen Mirjalili were two members of the Guards who were suspected by the MEK and were kidnapped, tortured and finally killed. Taleb Taheri was only 17 years old at the time.
Sedaqat, a legal expert, then took the stand and provided explanations on the subject of the engineering operation, its origins, factors, and effects. He said: “As an expert, I must have an analytical view of this incident. It must be investigated why such actions were taken and why these tortures were carried out.” According to the confessions of one of the leaders of the group and the head of their military branch in Tehran, which were read by the defense attorney, these tortures were very brutal and similar tortures cannot be found even in the Middle Ages. This amount of brutality and misconduct is unprecedented in history.
Based on the confessions of the arrested members of the MEK, Kazemi read details of the ruthless tortures MEK agents committed against the five victims of Engineering Operation to the audience.