Khalkhali was one of Khomeini's circle of disciples as far back as 1955 and reconstructed the former secret society of Islamic assassins known as the
Fadayan-e Islam after its suppression, but was not a well-known figure to the public prior to the
Islamic revolution. On 24 February 1979, Khalkhali was chosen by
Ruhollah Khomeini to be the
Sharia ruler () or head the newly established
Revolutionary Courts, and to make Islamic rulings. In the early days of the revolution he sentenced to death "hundreds of former government officials" on charges such as "
spreading corruption on earth" and "
warring against God." Most of the condemned did not have access to a lawyer or a jury. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979,
Reza Shah's mausoleum was destroyed under the direction of Khalkhali, which was sanctioned by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khalkhali ordered the
executions of
Amir Abbas Hoveida, the Shah's longtime prime minister, and
Nematollah Nassiri, a former head of
SAVAK. According to one report, after sentencing Hoveida to death: Pleas for clemency poured in from all over the world and it was said that Khalkhali was told by telephone to stay the execution. Khalkhali replied that he would go and see what was happening. He then went to Hoveyda and either shot him himself or instructed a minion to do the deed. "I'm sorry," he told the person at the other end of the telephone, "the sentence has already been carried out." By trying Hoveida, Khalkhali effectively undermined the position of the provisional prime minister of the Islamic Revolution, the moderate Mehdi Bazargan, who disapproved of the
Islamic Revolutionary Court and sought to establish the Revolution's reputation for justice and moderation. Khalkhali held antipathy towards pre-Islamic Iran. In 1979 he wrote a book "branding king
Cyrus the Great a tyrant, a liar, and a
homosexual" and "called for the destruction of the
Tomb of Cyrus and remains of the two-thousand-year-old Persian palace in
Shiraz,
Fars province, the
Persepolis." According to an interview by Elaine Sciolino of Shiraz-based Ayatollah Majdeddin Mahallati, Khalkhali came to Persepolis with "a band of thugs" and gave an angry speech demanding that "the faithful torch the silk-lined tent city and the grandstand that the Shah had built," but was driven off by stone-throwing local residents. At the height of the
Iran hostage crisis in 1980 following the failure of the American rescue mission
Operation Eagle Claw and crash of U.S.
helicopters killing their crews, Khalkhali appeared on
television "ordering the bags containing the dismembered limbs of the dead servicemen to be split open so that the blackened remains could be picked over and photographed," to the anger of American viewers. The site was subsequently razed, along with the entire neighborhood, for the construction of a mosque and a new road. In addition to presiding over the Islamic Revolutionary Court that brought about the execution of dozens of members of elected Bahá'í Councils, Khalkhali murdered a Bahá'í, Muhammad Muvahhed, who disappeared in 1980 into the revolutionary prison system. It was later reported that Khalkhali personally went to Muvahhed's cell, demanded that he recant his faith and become a Muslim. When Muvahhed refused, Khalkhali covered his face with a pillow and shot him in the head. Khalkhali later investigated and ordered the execution of many activists for federalism in
Kurdistan and
Turkmen Sahra. One of the complaints of the revolution's leader and Khalkhali's superior, the
Ayatollah Khomeini against the regime they had overthrown was that the Shah's far more limited number of executions of drug traffickers had been "inhuman." In December 1980 his influence waned when he was forced to resign from the revolutionary courts because of his failure to account for $14 million seized through drug raids, confiscations, and fines, although some believe this was as much the doing of President Bani-Sadr and the powerful head of the
Islamic Republic Party Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti "working behind the scenes" to remove a source of bad publicity for the revolution, as a matter of outright corruption. In the protests of
20 June 1981 Iranian protests, Khalkhali declared that the judiciary was obligated to execute a minimum of fifty agitators daily. In an interview, Khalkhali personally confirmed ordering more than 100 executions, although many sources believe that by the time of his death he had sent 8,000 men and women to their deaths. In some cases he was the executioner, where he executed his victims using machine guns. In an interview with the French newspaper
Le Figaro he is quoted as saying, "If my victims were to come back on earth, I would execute them again, without exceptions." Khalkhali sided with reformists after the election of President
Mohammad Khatami in 1997, although he was never really accepted by the movement. ==Later years and death==