NR:

At first, he couldn’t identify the sound. But Amir Atiabi, an inmate in Iran’s Gohardasht Prison, was curious. Over the course of several nights in 1988, he recalled, “strange noises that sounded like the dropping of cooking-gas containers” reverberated from trucks in the jail’s loading dock. Each time, he marked the date on his calendar. On some days, the sound echoed through his cell as many as 50 to 55 times.

Eventually, he discovered the truth. One night, Atiabi said, he and his fellow prisoners “went to the end of the corridor to the shower room and toilettes and climbed up to see through the window what the hell this truck is doing in the middle of the night. We had never seen such a thing. Then we realized they were loading dead bodies onto the trucks.”

“After a while,” he added, “the noises would stop because when you put bodies on top of other bodies you won’t hear the noise anymore.”

Thirty years later, the systematic massacre of thousands of political dissidents remains the single bloodiest atrocity committed by the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979. 

Go to link