Hassan-Ali Nayeri—one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s most notorious executioners—has died. Nayeri, a hardline cleric and judge, played a central role in one of the darkest chapters of modern Iranian history: the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988.
Iranian citizens familiar with the regime’s brutal legacy know Nayeri as a founding member of the infamous “Death Committee,” established by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This committee, functioning outside any legal norm, was tasked with a chilling mission: to purge the Islamic Republic of dissent.
Thousands—some estimate over 30,000—of political prisoners, most of them members or sympathizers of opposition groups like the MEK (Mujahedin-e-Khalq), were brought before makeshift tribunals in Iranian prisons. There, Nayeri and his fellow “judges” would ask a single question: Will you renounce your beliefs and support the regime? Those who refused were sentenced to death, often within minutes. They were hanged in secret and buried in unmarked mass graves, their families never informed.
Among the other key members of this Death Committee was none other than Ebrahim Raisi, the man who later rose to become President of Iran. Raisi, dubbed the “Butcher of Tehran,” was himself killed in a helicopter crash in 2024—a demise many Iranians saw as poetic justice.
The image of Nayeri and Raisi standing side-by-side alongside another regime loyalist, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i—the current head of Iran’s judiciary—symbolizes the systematic repression that has defined the Islamic Republic since 1979. These men, dressed in robes of religious authority, masked the regime’s crimes with a veneer of Islamic jurisprudence while facilitating mass murder.
Nayeri’s death comes amid a broader reckoning for the Islamic Republic. Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, has been rocked by internal dissent, economic collapse, and military defeats at the hands of Israel, especially following the Iron Swords War and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian-backed regime in Syria. At the same time, the regime’s global terror network—spanning Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen—is crumbling under international pressure and Israeli military dominance.
For the families of the victims of 1988, Nayeri’s death may bring a measure of closure—but not justice. True justice demands that Iran’s regime be held accountable for decades of repression, terrorism, and murder. Until that day comes, the world must remember the names of the victims, the crimes of the regime, and the silence that allowed mass murder to hide behind the robes of religion.
