Betht: On May 4, more than 1,100 families of victims of the 1988 massacre in Iran wrote a letter to the international community. They called on the United Nations and the European and American governments to take immediate action to prevent the regime from further destroying the graves of their loved ones.

Muhammad Shafai is one of the signers. He provided us with a picture as a small child in his mother's arms.

He says: I lost six of my relatives because of the regime's brutality. I was seven years old when my parents were arrested for their democratic ideas and activism.

My father, Dr. Mortada Shifai, was a well-known and well-respected doctor in Isfahan. People liked him because he was very sympathetic and tender. He was brutally executed by the regime in 1981 simply because he sought a democratic future for his family and comrades. The mullahs also killed my mother, my brother Majid (16 years old), Jawad, one of Mariam's sisters, and her husband.

He said: I lost my entire family, except for one sister, due to the regime's executions and its crimes against humanity.

The carnage

The 1988 massacre is considered one of the most heinous crimes against humanity after World War II. In the summer of that year, according to a fatwa issued by Khomeini, the supreme leader of the mullahs' regime in Iran at the time, tens of thousands of political prisoners were liquidated. Most of the victims belonged to the main democratic opposition movement, the PMOI.

The regime killed at least 30,000 political opponents that year within a few months. This was confirmed by the heir-appointed to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, in his published notes and leaked audio recording in 2016, in which he condemned the ongoing crime against humanity in August 1988 during a meeting with senior regime officials. These officials continue to serve the regime today in senior positions.

 Ibrahim Raisi, for example, who was a member of the "death committees" responsible for arresting and killing political prisoners, is currently the chief justice. He is expected to reach the presidency during the June elections.

For years, the mullahs' regime has systematically and gradually destroyed the graves of the victims of the 1988 massacre in Tehran and other cities. As the world learns about more killings and growing international outrage, Tehran's mullahs are striving to remove all traces of their crimes against humanity.

Muhammad Shafai reiterates: Most of us have forgotten the burial places of their loved ones accurately, and many of them are in mass graves. The campaign for justice for the victims of 1988 gained greater and widespread significance. International human rights organizations and experts described the massacre as a crime against humanity and called for the perpetrators of this heinous crime to be held accountable.

Driven by the implications of international scrutiny for these horrific atrocities, the Iranian regime set out to erase traces of evidence of the massacre by destroying the mass graves in which the victims were buried. In its latest attempt, the regime tried to destroy mass graves of political prisoners in the Khwaran cemetery in Tehran. Previously, mass graves of the 1988 victims were destroyed or damaged in Ahvaz, Tabriz, Mashhad and elsewhere.

These acts constitute mass torture of thousands of survivors and families of martyrs. It is another clear case of crimes against humanity.

The United Nations and international human rights organizations must prevent the regime from destroying mass graves, removing evidence of its crimes, and torturing thousands of victims' families across Iran.

Moreover, the Iranian people and all human rights defenders expect the United Nations, in particular the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to set up an international commission of inquiry to investigate the massacre of political prisoners and summon the perpetrators of this heinous crime to the International Court of Justice.