He was a believing Christian who was murdered eight days after the 1979 revolution.

Information regarding the extrajudicial execution of Mr. Parviz (known as Arastoo) Sayah Sina was obtained from an interview by the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center with one of the neighbors of Mr. Sayah Sina’s family (March 7, 2022). Additional information has been obtained from the newspapers Kayhan (February 21, 1979, August 11, 1980, August 24, 1980, August 26, 1980, August 30, 1980, September 24, 1980, December 10, 1980, December 23, 1980, February 9, 1981); Ettela'at (February 21 and 22, 1979, May 13, 1980, August 27, 1980); Jomhuri-ye Eslami (August 25, 1980); the book The Hard Awakening by Mr. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti* (1980); the websites Archives of the Episcopal Church (February 12, 1980); Article 18 (February 19, 2019); Buffalo News (February 28, 2016); Independent (May 23, 2008); the Christian website Kalameh (July 8, 2020); Holy Communion of the Diocese of Iran (1971, July 20, 2020); Deutsche Welle (February 18, 2021); and Radio Zamaneh (January 17, 2021). 

According to the available information, Mr. Sayah Sina was born into a famous and cultured family in Shiraz. After Mr. Sayah Sina finished high school, he went to Esfahan and became a textile worker at that city’s Vatan factory. At the age of 36, after meeting Mr. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti,* the bishop of the Anglican Church, he accepted Christianity and studied Christian theology. At the age of 38, he went to India and studied theology at a university in Punjab, and at the age of 40, he became an assistant to Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti.

According to his colleagues, Mr. Sayah Sina was a true Christian and had a great passion for teaching the Bible. He went to the villages to preach his religion and brought a medical team with him to help the villagers. He also created jobs for unemployed people (Article 18). 

At the age of 45, Mr. Sayah Sina returned to Shiraz and became the pastor of St. Simon's Anglican Church. There, he married an English nurse who worked at Morsaleen Hospital in Shiraz. The couple had two sons.

Mr. Sayah Sina had a warm voice and accompanied his sermons with old Persian hymns and traditional music, radif avaz. He organized arts and crafts workshops for children, and children of all religions could participate in them. Mr. Sayah Sina was a well-known, respected and active person in Shiraz's Kuche Ad-Din (Alley of Religions), where Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians lived together. The Kuche Ad-Din had a synagogue, a church, and a Zoroastrian temple. Before and after the 1979 revolution, Muslims who were active in the Islamic Propaganda Association used to come to the church to preach Islam, and they mocked and harassed those who went to the church (Interview with an acquaintance of Sayah Sina's family).

Background

While Christianity counts among the three Abrahamic religions officially recognized in Iran, the status carved out for Christians by the Constitution and civil and penal code is markedly inferior. In practice, religious tolerance applies only to ethnic groups who are historically Christian, i.e. Armenians and Assyrians, and not to believers or converts from Muslim backgrounds. The Iranian government has implemented policies that demarcate, monitor, and aggressively suppress Christian civic presence.

The Constitution bars Christians from becoming President, members of the Guardian Council, Army Commanders, School Principals, and from holding senior government positions. They are prohibited from running in General Parliamentary elections, and the three seats allocated to Christians in Parliament are exclusively for Armenian, Assyrian, and Chaldean representatives.

Civil and criminal statutes explicitly disadvantage Christian parties. They are entitled to less compensation in car-accident settlements and cannot inherit property from Muslims. Several offenses punishable by lashings for Muslims are for Christians punishable by death.

The activities of Christian churches and peoples have long been subject to Ministry of Culture surveillance. A law purporting to flag sellers of non-halal foods requires Christian shop owners to display signs reading “designated for religious minorities;” in practice, this signage has been enforced on all Christian businesses as a deterrent to Muslim patrons. Christians have reported denials of academic admissions and business permits on religious grounds. By the mid-90s all but two Protestant churches had closed under various government pressures, including demands to provide congregants’ names and personal information.

Since the revolution, hundreds of Christians have been detained arbitrarily. Many are sentenced to various prison terms and others are released with the specter of charges and investigations against them that are left open indefinitely. Multiple sources who have been arrested or detained reported being threatened by judicial or security officers with apostasy charges, execution, or assassination. With apostasy left unaddressed in penal code, judges defer to the Shar’ia, leaving Christian converts vulnerable to death sentences; it is also left to the personal discretion of judges whether the murder of a Christian by a Muslim even constitutes a crime. The state has historically displayed a lack of due diligence in resolving the cases of Christians who die in suspect circumstances, which further exacerbates the precarity of Christians’ social and legal status.

While the Iranian government does not publicize official data on the size of Iran’s Christian population, available sources reflect the consensus that conversions from Islam have been steadily on the rise since the revolution, and that Iranians with Christian leanings could now number as high as 1 million, or 1.5 percent of the population. The regime thus continues to invest significantly in the surveillance of Christian activities. Scores of Christians have fled Iran and taken refuge in other countries.. 

The 1990s marked a period of religious crackdowns that staggered, among others, Christian communities. Amid the overall increase in executions, corporal punishments, raids, and press restrictions, scores of Christian converts were imprisoned and tortured. In an effort to curb growing public interest in Christianity, Iran placed caps on church attendance, shut down Iran’s main Persian-language bible publisher, prohibited sermons in Persian, confiscated all Christian books, closed all Christian bookstores, and dissolved the Iranian Bible society. As of 2023, of 43 Protestant churches in Iran, 16 remain of which 10 are in Tehran. Only four are permitted to preach in Persian.

Episcopal Churches in Iran

The Episcopal Church in Iran, a diocese of the Anglican Union, was established by British missionaries in Iran during the 19th century, and is influenced by the traditions, beliefs and management of the Anglican Church. Until 1976, the church operated under the management of the Diocese of London. With the establishment of the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Diocese of Iran became a member of the Church of Jerusalem. 

In 1961, the first native Persian-speaking bishop was appointed and gradually the church became a community with an Iranian majority. The Episcopal Church was mainly composed of Muslim converts and its sermons were delivered in the Persian language. The "Christian Missionary Society" played a key role in the official establishment of the Church of Iran by focusing on education, establishing and managing hospitals, and missionary activities. Missionary activities in the 19th and 20th centuries included helping famine victims, and educational activities that led to the establishment of schools (including girls' schools), hospitals, and churches in various cities in the south of Iran, including Yazd, Esfahan, Kerman and Shiraz. These activities continued despite internal changes, war, and crisis conditions that led to the loss of institutions, deadly violence, and oppression of the church’s members. The church maintained its presence in Iran and, according to available information, at the end of the 20th century, it had about four thousand members inside and outside Iran.

The Islamic Revolution fueled a new wave of oppression and violence against religious minorities. The Anglican Church, which preached Christianity and had international affiliations, was a more vulnerable target. In the early 1970s, the church was still guided by Western missionaries, and the church's historical ties to England allowed religious revolutionary groups to accuse them of spying for Western powers. The first pastor, the leader of the Shiraz church, was brutally murdered a week after the revolution. From June 11, 1979, to August 20, 1980, the assets of several Anglican churches were confiscated and their institutions brought under the control of the Islamic regime; priests and church members were threatened, arrested, interrogated and imprisoned. A number of them were also forced into exile.

Background of Extrajudicial Killings by the Islamic Republic of Iran

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 and have continued since then, both inside and outside Iran. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center has so far identified over 540 killings outside Iran attributed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dissidents have been assassinated by the agents of the Islamic Republic outside Iran 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 most cases, there has not been much published, and local authorities have not issued arrest warrants. But documentation, evidence, and traces obtained through investigations conducted by local police and judicial authorities confirm the theory of state committed crimes. In some instances, these investigations have resulted in the expulsion or arrest of Iranian diplomats. In a few cases outside Iran, the perpetrators of these murders have been arrested and put on trial. The evidence presented revealed the defendants’ connection to Iran’s government institutions, and an arrest warrant has been issued for Iran’s Minister of Information.

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 that ordered the implementation of these crimes. 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 and their sentence is death regardless of where they are.” 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.”

At the same time, various political, judicial, and security officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran have, at different times and occasions, confirmed the existence of a long term government policy for these extrajudicial killings and in some cases their implementation. 

Read more about the background of extrajudicial killings in the Islamic Republic of Iran by clicking on the left hand highlight with the same title.

Mr. Parviz Sayah Sina’s extrajudicial execution

Eight days after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, on Monday, February 19, 1979, Mr. Sayah Sina was murdered by two people in his office in Simon the Zealot Church in Nobahar Alley in Shiraz.

He had a warm voice and accompanied his sermons with old Persian hymns and traditional music radif avaz.

According to available information, in the first days of the revolution, two members of the Shiraz Islamic Association who had shown themselves to be interested in the Christian religion, had contacted Mr. Sayah Sina in order to learn about Christianity from him. Bishop Dehqani Tafti wrote in his memoirs that on the day of Mr. Sayah Sina’s killing, he had entered his office in the Shiraz Anglican Church, which was somewhat distant from the rest of the buildings, with two acquaintances who had been meeting and consulting with him for some time. Concerned about his father’s delay in returning home, his son went to the office and found his lifeless body. Mr. Sayah Sina’s carotid artery had been cut with a knife. A bullet and a note were left beside the body. (The Hard Awakening by Mr. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti) There is no reliable information about the content of the note. 

According to a neighbor and acquaintance of Mr. Sayah Sina’s family: “When this happened, the police didn’t allow anyone to approach the crime scene, but there was a rumor his head had been cut off. This method of killing resulted in a lot of fear and terror among the local people. That was the purpose of this type of killing.” (Interview with one of the neighbors of Mr. Sayah Sina’s family). 

The information about the killers of Mr. Sayah Sina is contradictory and unclear. According to Kayhan newspaper: “Komron Sayah, son of the murdered priest, stated that: two men named Behrouz Kola’i and Hassan Nasihat were in contact with my father until one hour before the murder,” (Kayhan, February 21, 1979). Ettela’at newspaper reported that four people were arrested under suspicion of participating in the murder of Mr. Sayah Sina, but no information was given regarding their identity (Ettela’at newspaper, February 22, 1979). The connection between these people and the members of the Islamic Association is not clear, and it is also not clear whether Behrouz Kola’i and Hassan Nasihat are two of the four people arrested. 

Mr. Sayah Sina was the first of several church leaders to be murdered after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. His tombstone, which the family was not permitted to put up for a number of years, recorded the date of Mr. Sayah Sina’s death as February 20, 1979. 

Officials’ Reaction

According to available information, the news of Mr. Sayah Sina’s murder was published in official newspapers, but responsibility for the murder was attributed to CIA-affiliated agents (Ettela’at newspaper, February 22, 1979). According to Bishop Dehqani Tafti, two people who were seen with Mr. Sayah Sina on the day of the murder were interrogated by the police but not arrested. (The Hard Awakening by Mr. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti) 

The investigation into Mr. Sayah Sina’s murder was conducted by the investigator of the Shiraz Prosecutor's Office’s Branch Two, but Mr. Sayah Sina’s murderers were never identified in the investigation. Four people were arrested under suspicion of participating in the murder of Mr. Sayah Sina. These people were the last ones to meet with him (Ettela’at newspaper, February 22, 1979). 

Shortly after the murder of Mr. Sayah Sina, hospitals affiliated to the church in Esfahan and Shiraz were confiscated. The employees were fired and the name of the church hospital was changed to "Revolution Hospital.” Foreign workers were ordered to leave the country, and then all the assets of the Shiraz Church were confiscated by the Islamic Revolutionary Court.

Familys’ Reaction

There is no information available regarding the reaction of Mr. Sayah Sina’s family. 

Impacts on Family

Following Mr. Sayah Sina’s extrajudicial killing, his family was forced to leave Iran and went to Europe. 

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* Hassan Dehqani-Tafti was the first Iranian Anglican Bishop. He was a Muslim who converted to Christianity. He was in charge of the Diocese of Iran. In October 1979, he, along with his British wife, were shot in their Esfahan bedroom by five armed, unknown men, but none of the bullets hit him. Mr. Dehqani-Tafti’s wife was wounded in the incident. A week after, he left Iran to attend a meeting of Anglican Bishops in Cyprus, and when he wanted to return, members of the Bishops committee stopped him. In May of that same year, his secretary was shot and seriously wounded. On May 6, 1980, his son Bahram, as he was returning from teaching at Demavand College, had his automobile stopped by several people. They took him to a quiet street near Tehran Prison, then shot and killed him in his own car.