Word: savak
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While Khomeini's Islamic Guards are executing enemies of the regime in the streets, they are also torturing suspected opponents behind prison walls with a ferocity unequaled even by the deposed Shah's notorious SAVAK agents. Many of the prisoners who are being tortured are merely relatives of dissidents sought by the political police. One victim, who is now in hiding in Iran, described his ordeal to TIME
...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 with Khomeini's customary boldness...
...liberals and leftists who were on record as opposing the dictatorship of Muslim fundamentalists. The most illustrious victim was Poet Said Soltanpour, who had been arrested at his own wedding several weeks before. As an indomitable opponent of the Shah, Soltanpour had been tortured for his views by the SAVAK, the imperial secret police. At his summary trial last week, Soltanpour told Gilani that he regarded the Islamic Republic as a reactionary and corrupt regime that would soon be "crushed by the people it has betrayed." Gilani sentenced him to death as a "crusader against...
...repeatedly undercut the diplomacy of both officials. They listened only to Khomeini, who, hospitalized with a weak heart, decreed that the hostage issue would be decided by the Islamic parliament to be elected two months later, in May. The U.N. commission heard and saw grisly evidence of torture by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, but was not allowed to see the hostages. Sick or not, Khomeini was stage-managing his media event, and he wanted all attention directed at the Shah's crimes, not at the suffering of the hostages. A cautiously worded letter from Hostage William...
Asked about charges that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency assisted the shah's secret police--SAVAK--Sullivan acknowledged that U.S., British and Israeli intelligence agencies combined to set up SAVAK, but said its "use as a political instrument was a strictly Iranian inspiration...