There’s one in every bunch. Funny thing about corrupt jerks– they seem to be everywhere, whether you’re a Western-style “democracy” or a revolutionary-style place like Iran in the early 80s. The more I learn about that place we’re occupying and their neighbors, the more I realize there’s really not a whole lot separating us. Here’s the obituary of Ayatollah Khalkhali from today’s Boston Globe. —DXO
Ayatollah Khalkhali, Iran’s ‘Hanging Judge’
TEHRAN — Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, who became known as the Iranian revolution’s “Hanging Judge” for ordering summary executions after trials of only a few minutes, died Wednesday at a Tehran hospital. He was 77.
His son, Mohammad Givi-Khalkhali, attributed the death to old age and illnesses of the heart and brain, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said.
Ayatollah Khalkhali was the most feared of the judges appointed after the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed in 1979.
As president of the Islamic Revolution Court, Ayatollah Khalkhali was prosecutor, judge, and jury for those deemed counterrevolutionaries and for people charged with being drug dealers. In his autobiography, Ayatollah Khalkhali wrote that he ordered executions for 85 members of the shah’s government and security forces. But other Iranians said he sent hundreds to their deaths without fair trial during his two years on the bench.
Dissidents accused him of executing thousands. Some of his trials lasted only minutes.
It was widely reported in Iran that when Nematollah Nasiri, the head of the shah’s feared secret police, went before Ayatollah Khalkhali, the judge picked up a pistol and shot him dead.
Abbas Hoveida, the shah’s longest serving prime minister, had two brief appearances before the ayatollah and then was led outside accompanied by the judge. A shot was fired, and Ayatollah Khalkhali returned to the courtroom and announced the sentence had been carried out. It was not revealed who fired the bullet into the back of Hoveida’s head.
In retirement, Ayatollah Khalkhali was unrepentant. He said the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had given him wide powers and it was necessary to use them.
“I believe, and still believe, that all members of the shah’s parliament and senate and all provincial governors and generals should have been sentenced to death,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Ayatollah Khalkhali Remembers,” published in 2000.
“But only a few of them were sentenced to death, and most of them left the country,” he added.
In his final years, Ayatollah Khalkhali seemed to have a change of heart and supported some of the liberalization ideas promoted by President Mohammad Khatami and other reformers. But the reformist movement, which has spent years fighting Iran’s dominant unelected hard-line clerics, never embraced the former judge.
Ayatollah Khalkhali was a judge until 1981, when he was forced to resign because of a failure to account for millions of dollars seized in raids on drug traffickers and amassed from court fines.
He served for eight years in parliament, where he headed the foreign policy committee. He then taught religious studies in the holy city of Qom before stopping work in 2002 after suffering a stroke.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company