Images from the American company Planet Labs PBC show how the parking space is being laid over the vast cemetery of Behsht-e Zahra. The remains are reportedly still under the asphalt, ABC News reports. Iranian officials have recognized the recent decision to build the parking space, without being further expressed about the people who are buried there.
Tombstones
The cemetery, which has been guarded with cameras for a long time, has already been the scene of a demolition sponsored by the state. In addition, tombstones were destroyed and overthrown.
A special rapporteur from the United Nations described the destruction of cemeteries by Iran last year as an attempt to ‘hide or erase data that may serve as possible evidence to make legal accountability’ for his actions.
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‘Fits in wider pattern’
Shahin Nasiri, teacher at the University of Amsterdam who did research into the plot area, stated that “most graves and tombstones of dissidents were desecrated and the trees in the area were deliberately dried out.” Nasiri. “The decision to transform this area into a parking space fits in a broader pattern and represents the final phase of the destruction process.”
A pronounced lawyer in Iran, Mohsen Borhani, criticized in an interview with the Dagblad Shargh openly the decision to pave the cemetery. According to him, it is “neither morally nor legal.” Borhani: “The piece was not only for executed and political people. Ordinary citizens were also buried there.”
Whether there are indeed human remains under the asphalt layer or whether the Iranian authorities have moved the bones of the dead there remains unclear. It is known, however, that Iran has destroyed other cemeteries in recent years where victims of the mass execution were in 1988.
‘Paradise of Zahra’
Behsht-e Zahra, or the ‘Paradise of Zahra’, was opened in 1970. While hundreds of thousands of Iranians flowed into the capital and the oil richness of the country rose explosively, the pressure on the cemeteries in Tehran increased.