Word: evin
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Sometime on the night of Sept. 4, a contingent of heavily armed Islamic guards arrived at Evin Prison in northwest Tehran in a caravan of largely empty Jeeps and minibuses. As sleepy-and astonished-prison guards watched, the intruders rounded up some 150 prisoners, many of whom had recently been incarcerated for political crimes by the fundamentalist courts of the beleaguered Khomeini regime. Corralled into groups of eight to ten, the prisoners were led outside to the waiting vehicles. When some guards objected to the mysterious procedure, they were crisply told to mind their own business...
TIME has learned through sources within the Khomeini regime that the prisoners, including a number of teenagers, were taken from Evin to unknown locations and murdered. Relatives of other executed dissidents stumbled upon "mounds of untended bodies" at Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, south of Tehran, and were able to identify some as the missing prisoners. SAVAK agents under the Shah once used the same cemetery as a dumping ground for their murdered victims, burying the bodies in unmarked graves. For the first time since Iran's clerical government took over in February 1979, the mass execution was not announced...
Islamic guards led the dozen girls to the courtyard of Evin Prison in Tehran. The oldest was clad in a flowing black chador, the traditional Muslim veil. The others wore dark head scarves. As the guards began to blindfold them, the girls started chanting, "Death to fascism! Death to Khomeini...
...eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then machine-gunned them. He and another agent, Fereydoun Tavangari, said that SAVAK murdered other prisoners in their cells, then turned their bodies over to police medical examiners with an explanation that they had been killed in gun fights while resisting...
...signaled not truce but further bloodshed. On the next day, Khomeini forces attacked the Lavizan barracks in northeastern Tehran, home of the crack Javidan guards, killing the commander and many of his troops. Using acetylene torches, the attackers cut their way through electrically locked doors to free prisoners at Evin, a jail run by the hated SAVAK secret police. There the liberators found electric whips, torture beds and other interrogation devices that justified many of the atrocity charges long leveled at SAVAK. Also attacked was the Shah's principal residence in north Tehran, Niavaran Palace. Dispirited Imperial Guards on duty...