A dangerous mind: The legacy of Bijan Jazani and Iran's 1975 Evin executions

“It was over in less than 45 minutes,” said Bahman Naderipour (also known as Tehrani), an interrogator for Iran’s notorious secret police, Savak. 

On 19 April 1975, nine blindfolded prisoners, their hands tied, were taken off a minibus in northern Tehran’s Evin hills. They were told to sit on the ground and listen to a short speech by a senior Savak officer.

At the end of the speech, without warning, one of the agents pulled out a Uzi submachine gun and opened fire. The others joined in, taking turns shooting at the prisoners. Finally, one agent delivered the coup de grace to those still alive.

Once the extrajudicial execution was over, the blindfolds were removed, the hands untied, and the lifeless bodies were loaded back onto the minibus before being shuttled to the 501 military hospital in central Tehran.

The following morning, authorities said the nine political prisoners had been shot while trying to escape. The families were never given the bodies and were even banned from holding a funeral or memorial service.

According to Naderipour, who revealed the details of the killings after the 1979 revolution, the entire operation took just 45 minutes. But for many Iranians, the memory of the executions on 19 April has not faded.

The killing of the leftist Bijan Jazani, six of his comrades, and two senior members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) marked the beginning of a new method of execution and disappearance used by Savak, the secret police known for killing and disappearing dissidents during the rule of the Shah (1941-1979), Iran’s last king. 

These methods continued after the revolution, growing ever more brutal during the 1988 mass killing of political prisoners. 

Recently, the public appearance in the United States of 89-year-old Parviz Sabeti, a deputy head of Savak, has revived calls for justice from the families of those executed. The families, along with historians and former Savak agents who confessed after the revolution, say Sabeti planned and ordered the execution of the nine prisoners 50 years ago.

A dangerous mind

Naderipour’s confessions revealed that the speech given by a senior Savak officer before the execution made one thing clear: the prisoners, despite already serving their sentences, were being killed in retaliation for a Marxist guerrilla movement that began in 1971 in the village of Siahkal in northern Iran. 

“The message of the speech was that since your comrades and people like you are killing our colleagues, we’ve sentenced you, their leaders, to death. Because you promote these actions and stay connected to them from inside prison,” Naderipour said.

Maziar Behrooz, a historian at San Francisco State University and author of Rebels with a Cause, agrees. He links the killings to operations by the Organisation of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG) and PMOI groups, which had assassinated Savak agents. 

“If the words of Tehrani (Naderipour), a Savak agent who participated in the murder and was executed after the revolution, are to be believed, the murder of Jazani and company was a retaliation for the mentioned assassination,” Behrooz tells Middle East Eye.

'I rushed to see if Mihan had heard the news. The secret police’s Mercedes-Benz cars had blocked the street, letting no-one in or out. Mihan knew. She was mourning'

- Soudabeh, Bijan Jazani's sister

“Jazani and Hasan Zia-Zarifi were the two main thinkers of the independent Marxist movement in Iran. Their loss was a major blow to the movement,” he says.

Alongside Jazani and Zia-Zarifi, five other leftists - Saeed Kalantari, Ahmad Jalili Afshar, Aziz Sarmady, Mohammad Choopanzadeh and Abbas Sourki - were executed, along with two members of the PMOI, Mostafa Javan Khoshdel and Kazem Zol Anvari.

Jazani and his group had been arrested in 1968, three years before the Siahkal operation. Members who escaped the arrest later led that operation and formed the OIPFG.

While some link the 1975 executions to acts of revenge, others believe the real reason was something more threatening: Jazani’s theories.

Peyman Vahabzadeh, a sociology professor at the University of Victoria and author of A Guerrilla Odyssey, believes Savak killed Jazani because of his growing influence.

“By 1974, Savak knew that Jazani was the group’s main thinker and leader,” Vahabzadeh tells MEE. He compares Jazani’s role to that of Abdullah Ocalan, the prominent Kurdish leftist and founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“His ideas spread beyond prison walls and inspired activists on the outside,” Vahabzadeh says of Jazani. “So Savak killed him first, as the intellectual force inside. Then they went after Hamid Ashraf, the group’s military commander, and the rest of the leadership outside.”

Words smuggled on cigarette paper

Parviz Navidi, now 75, was once Bijan Jazani's close friend and comrade inside prison. A former member of the OIPFG, he remembers how they kept Jazani’s words alive, even behind the high walls of Iran’s political prisons.

They used cigarette papers bought from the prison store. Carefully, they copied Jazani’s writings in the smallest handwriting possible, squeezing entire pamphlets onto thin scraps of paper.

Sometimes, the writings were passed to the visiting family members of other political prisoners. Other times, they had to get more creative.

“The other method,” Navidi tells Middle East Eye from exile in Paris, “was to swallow the writings.”

They rolled and folded the papers until each was about the size of two dates. Then, they wrapped them in plastic, sealed them with melted candle wax, and made them waterproof. Prisoners who were being transferred or released would swallow the papers and retrieve them later. 

At the time, Jazani was serving a 15-year prison sentence. But he wasn’t sitting idle. Navidi remembers him urging others to stay active, even behind bars.

“Prison,” Jazani would say, “was just another piece of land outside.”

From inside the prison's walls, Jazani wrote about why armed resistance had become necessary under the Shah’s dictatorship. But he had not arrived at that belief overnight.

Jazani came from a deeply political family. He began his activism at just 10 years old. In the years after the 1953 CIA and British-backed coup in Iran, he joined peaceful movements, was arrested several times, and spent months going in and out of jail.

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By the time he was arrested again in 1968, Jazani had changed. After nearly 20 years of political activism, he no longer believed peaceful protest could stop the Shah’s regime or its brutal secret police, Savak.

Behind bars, he began writing pamphlets about the case for armed resistance and outlining a vision for a future people’s movement. His writings were smuggled out, copied, and shared across Iran and among student groups abroad.

Navidi says Jazani was not targeted in prison solely for his politics but for his ideas. “Our enemies know us better than we know ourselves. They go after the best of us,” he says.

Vahabzadeh agrees. He says Jazani’s thinking could have formed the foundation for a different future in post-revolution Iran.

“Jazani believed that the Fedai [OIPFG], the leading liberation movement at the time, should be rooted in all corners of oppressed society,” he explained.

“In the workers’ network, in squatter settlements, among women - everywhere. Not just running a military group, but building a popular movement in every walk of life.”

Half a century demanding justice

On 19 April 1975, Soudabeh, Jazani’s sister, went to a newspaper stand to buy the dailies, just as she did every day. A front-page headline stopped her cold: “Nine prisoners who attempted escape killed.”

“Reading that headline, I knew exactly what had happened,” she tells MEE on the 50th anniversary of her brother’s killing.

“I rushed to see if Mihan [Jazani’s wife] had heard the news. The secret police’s Mercedes-Benz cars had blocked the street, letting no-one in or out. Mihan knew. She was mourning,” Soudabeh recalls. 

She then hurried to her grandmother’s house. Her uncle, Saeed Kalantari, had also been among the nine prisoners.

“My grandmother hadn’t heard the news yet, and I didn’t know how to tell her that she had lost both her son and grandson,” she says.

Soudabeh, now 79 and living in the US, still speaks with a voice heavy with pain when she remembers that day.

Political activism ran deep in her family. She was just six months old when her father fled the country because of his political work. After the 1953 coup, nearly everyone on her mother’s side, except her two teenage uncles, her grandparents and herself, was imprisoned.

But the 1975 tragedy was different. “It was like a wall of rubble collapsing on us,” she says.

The repression did not end with the executions. Families were denied answers, denied the bodies of the dead and even denied the right to mourn together.

Soudabeh remembers how Savak followed her every day to and from the high school where she worked as a teacher. Even in the grocery store, an agent trailed her.

“The pressure was so intense, I felt like I was in a trap. Everyone I met ended up arrested or summoned by Savak,” she says.

It wasn’t until after the 1979 revolution that the family learned the truth about what had happened in the Evin hills and finally found the unmarked graves of the nine political prisoners.

Savak 'chief torturer' emerges from hiding

Soudabeh had encountered Savak’s notorious top deputy, Parviz Sabeti, twice. She says the hatred he had for Jazani was impossible to hide.

“We had to talk to Savak agents about my brother and uncle. Some of them were neutral. But when Sabeti spoke about Bijan, it was always with this deep hatred, like he couldn’t stand that he hadn’t brought Bijan to his knees,” she says.

Before the revolution toppled the Shah’s regime, Sabeti, described as the monarch's "chief torturer", fled Iran under a false name and passport. For decades, no one knew where he had gone until the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022 shook Iran and its diaspora.

In February 2023, as demonstrations continued both inside and outside Iran, Sabeti was seen in public for the first time since 1979 at a pro-monarchy rally in Los Angeles. 

His daughter, Pardis, now a computational biologist and Harvard professor, posted photos from the rally that included her father, alongside the caption: “44 years ago today, our native country fell into darkness. Hoping this year brings light and solidarity.” 

Sabeti’s appearance caused an uproar. But it also gave former political prisoners a rare chance to act.

On 10 February, three ex-prisoners filed a lawsuit against Sabeti in a federal court in Orlando, Florida. They accused him of institutionalising torture in Iran and laying the groundwork for the brutal tactics still used by the Islamic Republic today.

In the suit, the plaintiffs described Sabeti as “an architect of institutionalised torture”. They argued that the Islamic Republic “continued Savak’s policy of repression, censorship, torture, and executions” after the revolution.

Author and researcher Vahabzadeh said that although the move was long overdue, it opened the door to justice. 

“When Sabeti took over Savak, he transformed it. With Mossad’s help, he turned the agency into a modern repression machine. He pioneered what you could call ‘intelligent repression,’” he explains.

Vahabzadeh says the recent lawsuit will document large-scale human rights violations from that time and serve as a historical record of the pre-revolution era.

The former prisoner, Jazani’s friend Navidi, pointed to earlier but unsuccessful efforts in Europe to track down and prosecute Sabeti.

“Justice has no expiration date,” he says.

“It may be late, but it’s still right. Think of the Nazi trials, some happened decades after World War II. This lawsuit is the same idea. Whenever justice is served, it matters.”

Soudabeh is one of the many who supported the lawsuit. In March, 191 former political prisoners signed a petition demanding Sabeti’s trial. But she admits her hope is limited.

“I’ve always said, realistically, that Sabeti has multiple passports - probably from several countries, including Israel. We were never going to be able to arrest him,” she says.

“But at the very least, he knows the legal wheels are turning wherever he is. He can’t show up at monarchist events and expect to be welcomed. We still hope - just maybe, while we’re still alive - we’ll see that trial happen,” Soudabeh says.

Fifty years later, like many others who were killed, tortured, and jailed by Savak, she is still waiting for justice.