sentence was suspended. Iranian government's position Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who was speaking in the administrative council meeting in the city of Khorram-Abad in Lorestan province, on 28 August 2016 said: "We are proud we have implemented God's order about Mojahedin (PMOI or MEK)." In 2017 Ali Khamenei defended the executions, stating that those killed were "terrorists" and "hypocrites". The Iranian government accused those who were investigating the killings of "disclosing state secrets" and "threatening national security". According to Amnesty International, the Islamic Republic has engaged in an ongoing campaign to demonize victims, distort facts, silence family members of victims, silence survivors and silence human rights defenders. Officials implicated in the massacre have subsequently enjoyed promotions. Public awareness about the massacres and widespread condemnation have "compelled the Islamic Republic to engage in a damage-containment propaganda exercise." Other criticisms One complaint which was made against the mass killings was that almost all of the prisoners who were executed had been arrested for relatively minor offenses, since those who had been charged with committing serious crimes had already been executed. The 1988 killings resembled the 'disappearances' of prisoners in 20th-century Latin America. The "Islamic Revolutionary Courts" have been criticized "for holding unfair, secret summary trials without any semblance of due process and in violation of international human rights standards". According to Kaveh Shahrooz, "it is baffling that two of the world's most powerful human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have simply never written full reports on a crime as widespread as the 1988 extermination campaign." While Amnesty International's report "Iran: Violations of Human Rights 1987-1990" which was published in 1990 devotes a few pages to the massacre, the human rights organization has never written a full report on the killings. The Amnesty International report states: The political executions took place in many prisons in all parts of Iran, often far from where the armed incursion took place. Most of the executions were of political prisoners, including an unknown number of prisoners of conscience, who had already served a number of years in prison. They could have played no part in the armed incursion, and they were in no position to take part in spying or terrorist activities. Many of the dead had been tried and sentenced to prison terms during the early 1980s, many for non-violent offences such as distributing newspapers and leaflets, taking part in demonstrations or collecting funds for