Abdorrahman Boroumand Center

for Human Rights in Iran

https://www.iranrights.org
Memorial
Omid, a memorial in defense of human rights in Iran
One Person’s Story

Mohammad Hassan Mansuri

About

Nationality: Iran
Religion: Presumed Muslim

Case

Date of Killing: July 25, 1987
Location of Killing: Levent district, Istanbul, Turkey
Mode of Killing: Extrajudicial shooting

Human rights violations in this case

Extrajudicial killings

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a long history of politically motivated violence in Iran and around the world. Since the 1979 Revolution, Islamic Republic operatives inside and outside the country have engaged in kidnapping, disappearing, and killing a large number of individuals whose activities they deemed undesirable. The actual number of the victims of extrajudicial killings inside Iran is not clear; however, these murders began in February 1979, with the murder of Parviz Sayyah Sina, an Anglican Bishop, and have continued since then, both inside and outside Iran. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center has so far identified over 500 extrajudicial killings outside Iran attributed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.(1)

Dissidents have been assassinated by the agents of the Islamic Republic outside Iran, where one of the first assassinations, that of a Navy Officer, Shahriar Shafiq, took place in Paris in December 1979. These assassinations have taken place in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Pakistan in Asia; Dubai, Iraq, and Turkey in the Middle East; Cyprus, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Great Britain in Europe; and the United States across the Atlantic Ocean. In too many cases, states have failed to guarantee the victims’ rights to the truth, justice, and remedy; states have revealed little about the assassinations and have not issued arrest warrants. Where there have been arrests and prosecutions, available information reveals a state policy of eliminating perceived enemies. 

Documentation, evidence, and traces obtained through investigations conducted by local police and judicial authorities confirm, however, the theory of state committed crimes. In certain cases, these investigations have resulted in the expulsion (The Netherlands, 2018) or arrest (Brussels, 2020; Turkey, 2021) of Iranian diplomats. In limited cases outside Iran, the perpetrators of these murders have been arrested and put on trial (Paris 1980 and 1991) and the evidence presented, revealed the defendants’ connection to Iran’s government institutions, and an arrest warrant (the Mikonos Trial in Germany) has been issued for Iran’s then-Minister of Information, Ali Fallahian and the Deputy Minister of Telecommunications, Hossein Sheikh Attar.

The manner in which these killings were organized and implemented in Iran and abroad, is indicative of a single pattern which, according to Roland Chatelin, the Swiss prosecutor, contains common parameters and detailed planning. It can be ascertained from the similarities between these murders in different countries that the Iranian government is the principal entity who ordered the implementation of these crimes. (2). In 1997, the Berlin Criminal Court, in charge of hearing the case of the shooting of Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant, officially announced that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s highest-ranking officials had issued the order to carry out the killings. According to the indictment, the decision to commit the murders was made in a committee called the “Special Operations Committee” composed of the President, the Minister of Information and Security (VAVAK), the Minister of Foreign Affairs, representatives of the various security organs and other organizations, and finally, the Leader of the Revolution. 

Iranian authorities have not officially accepted responsibility for these murders and have even attributed their commission to internal strife in opposition groups. Nevertheless, since the very inception of the Islamic Republic regime, the Islamic Republic officials have justified these crimes from an ideological and legal standpoint. In the spring of 1979, Sadeq Khalkhali, the first Chief Shari’a Judge of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts, officially announced the regime’s decision to implement extrajudicial executions, and justified the decision: “ … These people have been sentenced to death; from the Iranian people’s perspective, if someone wants to assassinate these individuals abroad, in any country, no government has any right to bring the perpetrator to trial as a terrorist, because such a person is the implementing agent of the sentence issued by the Islamic Revolutionary Court. Therefore, they are Mahduroddam (“one whose blood may be spilled, whose life can be taken, without the perpetrator incurring any punishment”) and their sentence is death regardless of where they are [and where you find them].” 

More than 10 years after these proclamations, in a speech about the security forces’ success, Ali Fallahian, the regime’s Minister of Information stated the following regarding the elimination of members of the opposition: “ … We have had success in inflicting damage to many of these little groups outside the country and on our borders” (Speech broadcast on the state-run Iranian Radio and Television on August 31, 1992, quoted from Asr Iran, August 17, 2006).

Extrajudicial killings have rarely been pursued legally in Iran. The few murders that were followed up on in 1998 , which came to be known as “the Serial (Chain) Murders(3),” have brought to light the involvement and responsibility of the country’s Information officials. Several Ministry of Information agents who were defendants in the Serial Murders case, confirmed the existence of a long term government policy of extrajudicial killings and emphasized that there was planning on an annual basis to carry out these executions, for which a religious decree was issued. There was a budget allocated and there were objectives set, and those who participated in the murders were commended. In a lecture given at [the city of] Hamedan’s Bu Ali University in 1996, Sa’eed Emami, Ministry of Information Deputy Minister for Security Affairs and one of the principal defendants in the Serial Murders case – who was later said by Iranian officials to have committed suicide while in detention – had stressed that the activities of Iran’s security forces were not confined to the country’s borders: “ … We have set the security perimeter within the confines of our borders. [However,] if we see threats infiltrating inside the country from abroad, we will enlarge the perimeter.”

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1) Among the first known murders that occurred a week after the February 1979 Revolution was that of Mr. Parviz (Arastu) Sayyah Sina, the bishop of a church in the city of Shiraz. The assassination of Mr. Shahriar Shafiq, an Imperial Navy officer, in December 1979 in Paris is among the first murders committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran outside the country. ​​These killings continued in the following years inside and outside the country and in various forms.
2) Investigations into the murder of well-known personalities in France, Germany and Switzerland have yielded evidence and documentation showing that the officials and employees of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran acted as accomplices and principals [in the killings]. In France, the Islamic Republic’s Deputy Minister of Post and Telegraph was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for the murder of former Prime Minister Shapur Bakhtiar and his assistant, Sorush Katibeh. In Germany (Berlin), the Islamic Republic’s security agents and agents of the Lebanese Hezbollah were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four Kurdish opposition leaders. In connection with the latter case, German Judicial authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Ali Fallahian, the then-Minister of Information. 
3) A few days before Mr. Mokhtari’s murder, Dariush Foruhar and his wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, leaders of the People of Iran Party, had been killed in a most heinous manner in their own home. After Mr. Mokhtari’s body was found, the body of Mohammad Ja’far Puyandeh, another well-known literary figure, was discovered in a village near the city of Karaj. These four individuals’ cases was named the “Serial Murders”.
Human rights violations

Based on the available information, the following human rights may have been violated in this case:

  • The right to liberty and security of the person. The right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 3; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 9.1.

  • The right not to be punished for any crime on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence, under national or international law, at the time it was committed. 

UDHR, Article 11.2; ICCPR, Article 15, Article 6.2. 

  • The right not to be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honor and reputation. 

UDHR, Article 12, ICCPR, Article 17.1. 

  • The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including the right to change and manifest one’s religion or belief.

UDHR, Article 18; ICCPR, Article 18.1, ICCPR, Article 18.2; Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, Article 1 and Article 6.

In its general comment 22 (48) of 20 July 1993, the United Nation’s Human Rights Committee observed that the freedom to "have or to adopt" a religion or belief necessarily entailed the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace one’s current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views, as well as the right to retain one’s religion or belief. Article 18, paragraph 2, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.

  • The right to freedom of opinion and expression, including the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas.

UDHR, Article 19; ICCPR, Article 19.1 and ICCPR, Article 19.2.

  • The right to freedom of peaceful assembly. 

UDHR, Article 20; ICCPR, Article 21.

  • The right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of one’s interests.

UDHR, Article 20; ICCPR, Article 22.1.

  • The right, as a member of a religious or ethnic minority, to enjoy one’s own culture or to profess and practice one’s own religion. 

UDHR, Article 18; ICCPR, Article 27.

  • The right to equality before the law and the right to equal protection of the law. 

UDHR, Article 7; ICCPR, Article 26.

The right to due process

  • The right to be presumed innocent until found guilty by a competent and impartial tribunal in accordance with law.

ICCPR, Article 14.1 and Article 14.2.

Capital punishment

  • The inherent right to life, of which no one shall be arbitrarily deprived.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 3; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 6.1; Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, Article 1.1, Article 1.2.

  • The right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

ICCPR, Article 7; Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and Punishment, Article 1 and Article 2.

About this Case

Correct/ Complete This Entry

Mr. Mansuri was a major and a fighter pilot in the Pahlavi Era Air Force.  He defected to Saudi Arabia with an F4 fighter jet.

News of the assassination of Mr. Mohammad Hassan Mansuri was published in Cumhuriyet Turkish Newspaper (August 1, 1987; February 12, 1989; and March 16, 1990), and Milliyet Turkish Newspaper (May 8, 2000).  Additional information was gathered from Asoo website (February 1, 2019), Rozaneh (October 15, 2020), Balatarin (no date), and from an article published by Brigham Young University in the United States (2013).   

Major Mansuri, Pahlavi Era fighter pilot, was living in the United States (Balatarin).  On March 4, 1982, Mr. Mansuri took off from Bushehr Sixth Hunting Base with an F4 fighter jet on a training mission.  Mid-flight, he changed course, left Iran, and flew to Saudi Arabia.  He then requested asylum and emigrated to America.  Mr. Mansuri objected to the government of Iran’s persistence in continuing the Iran-Iraq was after the recapture of Khorramshahr (Balatarin). 

After leaving Iran, Mr. Mansuri contacted the Mojahedin Khalq Organization of Iran, and encouraged his former cohorts to leave Iran and to object to Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to continue the Iran-Iraq war.  This resulted in another fighter pilot defecting to Iraq with his F4 jet (Balatarin).

Background of the Iran-Iraq War and popular discontent 

The 8-year long Iran-Iraq war had roots in a number of historical territorial and political disputes including over the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab, a river that was the border between the two countries, dating back to the 1930s. The two countries had attempted to settle the border dispute through a treaty in 1937, from which Iran withdrew in 1967, and an agreement in 1975, which Iraq reneged on in 1980 shortly before its September 1980 offensive against Iran. Two months into the war, and after capturing the city of Khorramshahr, Iraq’s army had bogged down into Iran’s territory. By mid-1982, Iran had recaptured most of its territory and carried out offensives inside Iraq. 

In July 1982, The UN Security Council approved a resolution calling for an immediate cease fire between Iran and Iraq. The withdrawal of forces to their own borders, but Iran rejected the resolution. Iranian leaders stressed in various statements that the withdrawal did not satisfy Iran's conditions for an end to the war. [NYT, 6/30 and 7/14] For Iran’s decision makers, the fall of Saddam and compensation were the preconditions for peace. (Washington Post, February 21, 1983; FBIS April 24, 1985) The stalemate in the war inflicted a heavy cost, in particular on civilians as Iraqi and Iranian planes bombed population centers and targeted the oil industrial complexes in both countries, Iraq used chemical weapons against the Iranian army and its own Kurdish population and Iran sacrificed thousands, mainly young boys, on minefields in Iran. (NYT, March 14, 1985)  By 1986, the high human cost of the war, the shelling of the cities, and the displacement of the most at risk populations had weakened significantly popular support for the war. Critical statements and protests in April and May 1985 as well as defections, including of pilots, were reported by the media. (FBIS April 25, 1985; Washington Post, May 18, 1985)*

Mr. Mohammad Hassan Mansuri’s Death 

Mr. Mohammad Hassan Mansuri was killed on July 25, 1987, in Levent district of Istanbul, Turkey (Milliyet Turkish Newspaper, May 8, 2000; Asoo, February 1, 2019; Rozaneh, October 15, 2020). 

According to available information, Mr. Mansuri had gone to Istanbul to coordinate and facilitate the emigration of the family of another Iranian fighter pilot. He and an Iraqi diplomat were meeting with the family in a house in the Levent Neighborhood, when they were assassinated by two people with guns equipped with silencers (Asoo, February 1, 2019; Rozaneh, October 15, 2020). 

According to Milliyet Newspaper, members of Iranian backed Islamic groups in Turkey orchestrated the murder of Mr. Mansuri. Suspects who were arrested in connection with the assassination of several Turkish and Iranian citizens, and who were members of Islamic Groups in Turkey, confessed that these groups “received guerilla training in Iran and that 

the Iranian government provided them with money and training”. (Milliyet Turkish Newspaper, May 8, 2000) 

Examination of the bullets showed that Mr. Mansuri and Mr. Hadi Aziz Moradi were assassinated with the same gun (Asoo, February 1, 2019, Rozaneh, October 15, 2020; Balatarin).

Officials’ Reaction

There is no information on the reaction of Iranian or Turkish officials.

Reaction of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization  

The representative of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization in Paris condemned the assassination of Mr. Mansuri.  However, they declared that he had no connection with this organization (Cumhuriyet Turkish Newspaper, August 1, 1987).

Familys’ Reaction

There is no information on the reaction of Mr. Mansuri’s family.

Impacts on Family

There is no information on the effects of the assassination of Mr. Mansoori on his family.

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*1982
July: Iranian troops attacked Basra; Iranian forces entered Iraq and Iraq launched a counteroffensive; fighting took place around Qasr-i Shirin, opening up a new northern front; Iraqi planes attacked Hamadan, inflicting casualties; heavy fighting occurred around Basra; Iraqi jets attacked the towns of Ilam and Khurramabad; Iranian planes bombed Baghdad, and Iraqi planes attacked Ahwaz and Dizful in retaliation. [NYT, FBIS, WP] 
October: Iraqi forces launched a major offensive in the Mandali region, inflicting heavy casualties; Iraqi jets attacked Dizful, inflicting heavy casualties. [NYT, FBIS, WP] 
December: Iraq destroyed Iranian naval targets in the Gulf; Iraqi missiles attacked Dizful, inflicting serious casualties; Iran shelled Basra; the Iraqi forces carried out scores of bombing missions in Khuzistan; heavy fighting occurred on the southern front.  [NYT, FBIS] 
1983
Feb. 10: Iran's President 'Ali Khaman'i said the "punishment of the leaders of the Iraqi regime" was the main goal of the war. Iraq's withdrawal from Iran's territory was no longer a condition for peace, he said, because Iran had recaptured most of the land it lost. [2/21 WP] 
1985
January 19: UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar said a UN inspection team had found evidence that Iraqi planes bombed several civilian areas in Iran in January. [1/19 WP]
February: Iran and Iraq accused one another of shelling cities and other civilian areas; Apr. 20: A joint statement broadcast by clandestine Radio of the Iranian Toilers, the opposition Tudeh party and the Feda'iyan-i Khalq said recent demonstrations in Tehran protesting the Iran-Iraq war had been brutally crushed by regime authorities. [4/24 FBIS] 
March 13: Iran accused Iraq of using chemical weapons, and UN experts confirmed that Iranian soldiers had been affected by mustard gas and a nerve agent called tabun. [3/14 NYT] 
March 27: Iran said its demands for ending the war were the elimination of the Iraqi regime, $350 billion in war reparations, and the return of 200,000 Iraqi "refugees" to Iraq. [3/28 FBIS]
September: Iraqi planes continued to attack Kharg and naval targets near-by; foreign tankers continued to be attacked in the Gulf; Iranian planes bombed the ‘Ayn Zalah oil installation; Iranian planes raided Iraqi targets around Basra; Iraqi planes destroyed power stations at the Dizah and Rizasha dams; Iranian planes bombed power installations at the Dukan dam; Iranian artillery destroyed an Iraqi radar site at al-Faw; fighting occurred on the western and northern fronts. [FBIS, NYT]
October: Iraqi planes bombed Kharg and naval targets in the Gulf; Iraqi and Iranian planes attacked foreign tankers in the Gulf; Iranian forces launched an offensive in the Sumar area; Iraq attacked the Bahnegan, Cyrus, and Ardeshir oil fileds and the Khvor Malih monitoring station; Iranian planes attacked al-Halfaya and Darband oil installations. [FBIS, WP]
Apr. 25: The West German press agency reported that about 1000 people had been detained in Iran after they participated in peaceful demonstrations against the Iran-Iraq war. [4/25 FBIS] 
Motorists created a huge traffic jam in Tehran to demonstrate against the government and the war with Iraq, in answer to an appeal from Paris by exiled former premier Shahpur Bakhtiar. [5/18 WP]
May 18: The Washington Post reported that Iranian leaders were split over whether the fall of Saddam should be a precondition for ending the war. Speaker 'Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani and Foreign Minister' Ali Akbar Vilayati were reportedly in favor of ending the war without insisting on it, while President Khaman'i and Prime Minister Mir Husuyn Musavi held that his ouster was necessary. [5/18 WP]
June: Iranian and Iraqi planes raided each other’s capitals; Iraqi planes raided navel targets near Kharg and the island’s oil terminal; Iraqi planes attacked the Bandar Khumayni petrochemical complex; Iranian artillery raided Basra; Iraqi planes raided Tabriz, Isfahan, and Hamid; a huge explosion shook Baghdad; Iraqi planes attacked Ilam and Paveh, Kurdistan; Iranian and Iraqi planes shelled border towns; tankers continued to be hit in the Gulf; Iran reported heavy fighting in its southern region and in the central sector. [NYT, WP, AN]  

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