Photo: Abdorrahman Boroumand Center
Mohammad Mokhtari
محمد مختاری
1942–1998 · 28 years ago
- Born
- 21 April 1942
- Taken
- 3 December 1998
- Age
- 56 years old
- From
- Shahr-e Rey, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Mohammad Mokhtari was born in Mashhad in 1942 and studied Persian literature at Ferdowsi University. From 1973 he worked with the Shahnameh foundation and sat on its scholarly committee, and after the revolution he taught at the School of Dramatic Arts of Tehran University until the Cultural Revolution. In 1982 he was jailed for two years and banned for life from government work.
He was a respected poet and researcher, with several books of poetry and a study of myth and the Shahnameh. Friends in the Iranian Writers' Association, which he helped bring back to life, remember his patience and his constructive criticism, and he was one of the authors of the 1994 letter in which 134 writers spoke out against censorship.
How the regime took them
A few weeks before his death the Revolutionary Prosecutor's Office summoned him with five other organisers of the Writers' Association. On 3 December 1998 he left home to go shopping and never came back. The next day a body with nothing on it but a pen and a piece of paper was found near a cement factory in Aminabad, south of Tehran; he had been strangled. His son identified him at the morgue a week later.
The Ministry of Intelligence later admitted that its own officials were behind the killings of the four. (A 2008 Radio Farda report puts the two writers' deaths on 9 and 10 December 1998.)
Sources
- Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Omid memorial
- Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Omid memorial (Persian)
- Iran International (Persian), security agents block the Mokhtari and Pouyandeh memorial, 16 Azar 1403
- Radio Farda, the Mokhtari and Pouyandeh anniversary held in silence (2008)
Checked 12 November 2026
