IRAN. SISTERS PUBLISH LIST OF 9,400 IRANIANS 'MURDERED' BY THE REGIME

Ladan and Roya Boroumand, whose father, a pro-democracy opposition leader, was assassinated by an Iranian death squad while living in exile in Paris in 1991, unveiled the largest database of the victims murdered and executed by the theocratic regime since 1979.
The archive (www.abfiran.org) contained 9,400 confirmed cases, although they expected the figures to rise as visitors to the website provided fresh information and new names.
"The men and women whose stories you can read on this page are now all citizens of a silent city named Omid," said the site. "There, victims of persecution have found a common life whose substance is memory."
Among the entries was Atefeh Rajabi, a 16-year-old girl whose case became an international cause célèbre in 2004 when she was hanged for "acts incompatible with chastity" after she was raped and then refused to remain quiet about the attack.
Or a young girl in Teheran, "arrested for swimming in her home pool in a bathing suit, she was found guilty of causing 'a state of sexual arousal' in a neighbour from whose house she could be seen". She was sentenced to 60 lashes in April 1981, but died after the 30th. Her name is not known, but the case was widely reported at the time.
Or Ruhu'llah Rawhani, a 52-year-old salesman who followed the Bahai religion. Arrested and found guilty of converting a woman to Bahaism, he was hanged in a public square in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in 1998.
The database was unveiled on the 25th anniversary of the release of 52 American hostages held hostage for 444 days after the seizure of the United States embassy in Teheran.
"We want this site to keep alive the memory of the dead and to remind the world what is happening in Iran," Ladan said. "There is a direct link between Iran's pursuit of the bomb and support for international terrorism and how the regime treats its own people." The sisters, both historians based in Washington, hoped the database would also provide the basis for some form of future truth and reconciliation commission and human rights trials if the regime was overthrown. They had worked in exile on human rights since the early 1980s, but their mission to record the regime's victims became personal after the murder of their father, Abdorrahman Boroumand.