To the President of the highest judicial authority
Ayatollah Shahroudi

Following the transferral of the records to the court as a result of the murders of my parents, Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, and the granting of access to the files through lawyers, I have travelled to Iran to exercise my legal right of access to this file that has been unlawfully denied to me for the last two years.  The lawyers will enter an objection in this case following the expiration of the legal deadline. Yesterday however, after I had finished reading through the last of the investigation files, I thought I would make my personal protest known to you, the highest court authority and someone who has bears the tough responsibility of implementing justice in our country, by way of this letter. 

I have painstakingly studied the file but the confessions of the officials from the Ministry of Information in regards to the motives for their crimes and whoever ordered them to carry out their misdeeds, although the accused referred to an authority during questioning, remain unclear two years later. There is nothing in the file that refers to investigations into the instigators, despite the fact that some have even been mentioned by name.

Numerous pages have been removed from the current file and there are glaring gaps in timelines and content to be found. I have not been able to trace one single page in the records from the questioning of Said Emami, who, amongst others, has been repeatedly named as one of the main perpetrators by the questioned authorities. It is also not possible to ascertain from the file just how the subsequently imprisoned accused were suspected in the first place.

The file contains evidence that call the statements of the perpetrators regarding the manner of my parents’ murder into question. There are however no relevant inquiries to be found in the file.

If the authorities had not treated us from the very beginning as outsiders and had not deprived us of the self-evident right of file access under the pretence of protecting national security, then perhaps more truths would have come to light. In the face of the aforementioned points I urge you to change the procedures that have led to such flaws in the files up until now, so that we and our lawyers can be in direct contact with the investigative bodies and informed about further procedural developments.

Dear President of Justice, although much in the file has remained unsaid, the brutality and the maliciousness of the criminals has shone through in the language they used, the scale of the crime and the spirit behind a series of violent acts that happened on the evening of the 22^nd of November 1998 when the perpetrators entered my parents’ house and stabbed them in their hearts; hearts that had unfailingly beaten for a free Iran.  

The true compensation for this crime lies in thorough investigation and thereby putting a complete stop to this chain of violence, down to the very last link.

Yours sincerely,
Parastou Forouhar, Tehran, 10^th October 2000

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