In a recent interview, Parviz Sabeti, one of the key figures of the notorious SAVAK police of the ousted Shah regime, egregiously denied having had any role in torturing and executing Iranian dissidents during the tyrannical rule of Shah.
Sabeti, who was talking to Manoto, one of the Persian channels who has been actively promoting the remnants of the Shah regime and whitewashing the Shah’s crimes, said, “Officials and ministers knew me before because of the connections I had with Prime Ministers during the era of [Hassan Ali] Mansur and [Amir Abbas] Hoveyda, but the people didn’t know me. This caused jealousy and even a security threat for me since I was a known person who was working in the security domain. Even the opposition of these so-called guerrilla groups with me are due to the interviews that I later did about the People’s Fedai Guerrillas and the People’s Mojahedin Organization. They are more focused on my interviews rather than my actual work. I wasn’t involved in investigations and prisons. I was only doing office jobs. The only operation I was involved in was the [Teymour] Bakhtiar operation. And that was an external issue, not an internal one.”
It is worth noting that the SAVAK police, which was founded in 1957, was the Shah’s main tool for spying on, arresting, and torturing Iranian dissidents. The SAVAK was especially involved in the torture and killing of PMOI members. Sabeti, who was one of the top officials of the SAVAK, fled Iran before the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah regime.
Hundreds of PMOI members have given accounts of tortures by the SAVAK in the prisons of the Shah. Sabeti himself oversaw and carried out tortures.
One of them was former political prisoner Abolghassem Rezai. Three of Rezai’s brothers were murdered by Shah’s regime, including Mehdi, who was 19 years old at the time of his execution. Mehdi was brutally tortured during his imprisonment.
“Parviz Sabeti was the chief torturer. All the torture teams of the police and the SAVAK were under his control. They all carried out his commands,” Rezai said. “He personally oversaw the torture of all the important persons. My father shared a cell with Mehdi [Rezai] for some time. After his interrogation was finished, he said that [Sabeti] directly intervened in the interrogation and at his order, the guards did some very ruthless things and tortured him to break his spirit and to force him to repent in court. My father saw him in the cell and saw the signs of torture on his body, and he saw that they had burned him with an electric iron.”
After the 1979 revolution, Bahman Naderipour, one of the prison guards in Tehran’s Evin Prison under the Shah regime, had admitted that Sabeti was aware and had approved of an operation to murder several PMOI members who were in the prison.
Sabeti, who mainly kept a low profile in the past decades, showed up at a rally in Los Angeles on February 11, 2023, marking the 44th anniversary of the 1979 revolution. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, who now proclaims to represent the regime’s opposition, was also present at that rally.
During the 2022 nationwide uprising, the remnants of the Shah regime and their proponents tried to whitewash the crimes of the Shah regime and glorify criminals like Parviz Sabeti by holding placards with his picture and promising to murder his opponents.