The left-leaning opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), sounded the alarm over an escalation of executions targeting political prisoners in Iran.
Established in 1981, the NCRI is a broad coalition of Iranian opposition groups advocating for a secular, democratic, and non-nuclear republic, with the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) as its most organised core faction.
In a briefing yesterday that Brussels Signal attended, Mohammad Mohaddessin, NCRI’s Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, denounced the recent hanging of four members of the PMOI.
The four PMOI members, Mohammad Taghavi, Akbar Daneshvarkar, Babak Alipur and Puya Gobad, were executed on March 30 and 31, 2026, after months of detention marked by alleged torture and heavily criticsed judicial proceedings.
Their only “crime”, opposition leaders stressed, was resistance to a theocratic regime and participation in anti-government protests during the January uprising.
NCRI representatives warned that these executions may be a precursor to a broader massacre reminiscent of the 1988 mass killing of political prisoners, which saw thousands of PMOI members executed as the regime faced military and political setbacks.
“We fear what we are witnessing is the prelude to another massacre,” said Mohaddessin.
He said that in 1988 “90 per cent of the members of PMO were executed in matter of two or three months”.
The NCRI, also emphasised that the regime’s current fears are not rooted only in external conflicts with US intervention and war with Israel but in the resistance network within Iran.
They claim to have orchestrated more than 4,000 anti-regime operations in the past year alone.
Commenting on US intervention, the opposition leaders dismissed the notion that regime change could be achieved through foreign intervention alone.
NCRI representatives insisted that real transformation will be driven by the Iranian people and their organised resistance, not outside military force.
