At the very young age of only 19 years old and lacking any university education, Ebrahim Raisi was appointed as a prosecutor, rising over the following four decades to fill the positions of attorney general, deputy chief justice and, most recently, chief justice of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship.
He is responsible over thousands of dead and now give as excuse he was still young at the time of the Iran revolution and therefore can not be called responsible for the deaths of the people who were against the theocratic regime.
Raisi became an Islamist ideologue as a teen studying in the seminary in Qom and he does not have changed ideas or has not come to see how wrong he was and what a horrible thing he realy did.
Raisi was one of four members of a death committee responsible for the 1988 execution of thousands of Iranian prisoners of conscience in the space of a few months. The ideologically motivated mass executions constituted both a crime against humanity and genocide — a cleansing of religious infidels— according to international human rights expert Geoffrey Robertson.
It was a massacre, he says, comparable to those at Srebrenica and the Katyn Forest.
The most ridiculous part of it all, was that mostly leftist revolutionaries who had helped bring the regime to power were envisioned to be tested for their faith. In only a few minutes times with each prisoner — some young children — asking them questions to test their allegiance to radical Islam, Raisi decided about life and death. After prolonged and brutal torture, which in some cases was personally directed and overseen by Raisi, the Muslim clergyman played for God, taking the life of about 100,000 people killed by hanging or firing squad. Even the executioners became traumatised. Virgins were systematically raped before their execution, to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven. The executed were ordered to write their own names on their hands before they went to their death. The massacre is a trauma etched into the collective consciousness of all of the Iranian people, throughout the country and throughout the diaspora.
Though to this day, Raisi the past was part of that what had to be done to purify the country. In 2017, he posted to his Telegram channel a video in which he justified the massacre, and in 2018 called it “divine punishment” and a “proud achievement” for the revolutionary regime. During his tenure as attorney general (2014-2016), executions spiked significantly compared to previous years, and during his time as judiciary chief (2019-2021), the regime shot to death at least 1,500 peaceful protestors on the streets in more than 200 cities and imprisoned, tortured, and executed countless more, in the biggest act of state violence since the 1988 prison massacre.
Please read more: Meet ‘The Butcher,’ Iran’s New President Ebrahim Raisi