Fifty years ago, on April 19, 1975, by order of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, nine of Iran’s most prominent political prisoners were secretly gunned down and massacred. Bijan Jazani and six others from the People’s Fedaiyan organization, along with two members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)— Kazem Zolanvar and Mostafa Javan Khoshdel, both symbols of resistance under torture by SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police—were killed in a plot orchestrated by the infamous SAVAK official Parviz Sabeti.
This crime was one of the most heinous and brutal acts of the Shah dictatorship, aimed at eliminating the pioneers who had raised the banner of revolutionary struggle against tyranny, paving the way for freedom, independence, and popular sovereignty in Iran, and shaking the foundations of the Shah’s corrupt and autocratic rule. After the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, his regime systematically crushed dissent and committed any crime it deemed necessary.
In the brutal massacre of the seven Fedai and two PMOI members on April 19, 1975, carried out under Sabeti’s orders, these political prisoners—heroes who had humiliated their torturers through their resistance and were already serving prison sentences—were taken from their cells to the hills near Evin Prison. Without any prior notice or even a sham trial, following a meticulously planned criminal plot, they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and machine-gunned with astonishing cruelty. Subsequently, the Shah’s regime newspapers, under the perpetual control of the SAVAK, published a despicable and cowardly lie, claiming the nine prisoners were killed while attempting to escape during a transfer to another prison.
Astonishingly, remnants of the Shah’s regime and SAVAK thugs, now aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the mullahs’ intelligence infiltrators in their efforts to slander the Iranian people’s uprising in 2022-2023, displayed a shocking level of shamelessness during their demonstrations in February 2023. With audacity as repulsive as their past crimes, they held up photographs of the chief SAVAK henchman Parviz Sabeti alongside pictures of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, threatening the opposition forces with the slogan: “The future nightmare of terrorists.”
At that time, the Leader of the Iranian Resistance warned that such actions would only promote a transition from one form of tyranny (the mullahs’ regime) to another (the shah dictatorship). The choice should not be between one or another form of tyranny—it should be freedom.
Today, Parviz Sabeti, the chief SAVAK henchman and leader of the murderers of the nine Fedai and PMOI heroes on the hills near Evin, faces legal complaints exposing his torture and crimes against humanity. This is not merely a judicial case but further evidence against the entire Shah regime, which trampled human rights and responded to the call for resistance and freedom with bullets. The plaintiffs, political prisoners during the Shah’s era, have identified Sabeti as the architect of institutionalizing torture in Iran and pioneering the use of forced public confessions—a practice he developed and which has been expanded under the current clerical regime.
Following the filing of the case against Sabeti, the UK’s The Independent newspaper wrote that a source with knowledge of the case told the publication that the Shah and mullahs’ regime are “two sides of the same coin” and “The legacy of torture was built by [the Shah], and expanded by the Islamic Republic.”
On the anniversary of that bloody day, we clearly see that the stain of blood cannot be wiped clean from either the Shah’s boots and trappings or the mullahs’ slippers and cloak. The blood spilled on the hills of Evin fueled the fire of the Resistance Units and surges forward in a new democratic revolution, guided by the principle of “No to Shah no to mullahs”—the distillation of a century of the Iranian people’s struggle against dictatorship and foreign dependence—advancing more powerfully than ever.