DW Investigation: Iran's Elite Forces Plot Murders Through Secret 'Killing Machine'

In early 2026, Deutsche Welle's investigative unit began corresponding with a man using the pseudonym Omid, a scarred commander who had spent decades inside Iran's elite special forces. He carried with him photographs of sniper training, surveillance courses, and parachute jumps. He also carried something harder to document: an account of how the regime's security apparatus functions from the inside, and allegations of a clandestine circle of high-ranking officers who plot murders and abductions both within Iran and abroad.

Omid's story began at eighteen, when he joined Iran's security forces with what he described as a deep commitment to his country. What he found at the academy was total control. Cadets lived under regime supervision from dawn through evening prayers and political speeches. "They mold the minds of the young cadets," he told DW. The indoctrination was systematic and inescapable. As officers rose through the ranks, some eventually entered an elite cadre with access to unlimited resources and personnel—and, Omid said, he had attended their meetings.

DW spent months vetting Omid's account. The journalists had to consider whether he was a plant, sent to feed them misinformation and damage the broadcaster's Farsi service, which operates legally in Iran. Over time, they corroborated substantial portions of his testimony through documents, photographs, videos, and interviews with experts. An intermediary then connected them with a second high-ranking defector, a man called Reza, who had worked in Iran's Information Ministry—the country's intelligence agency. Reza's account corroborated key details Omid had provided. Both men's identities were confirmed by DW, though certain details were withheld to protect them and their families.

The regime maintains loyalty through a system of isolation and privilege. Officers like Omid received financial incentives, lucrative business contracts, and access to special housing compounds with their own mosques, schools, and hospitals. But these benefits came with a price: absolute control. Passports were confiscated. Travel required permission. The regime vetted officers' prospective spouses and decided which schools their children could attend. Officers could not discuss the true nature of their work, even with their wives. "It really eats away at you," Omid said. Saeid Golkar, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee who has studied Iran's security command structure, explained the logic: by segregating security forces from ordinary Iranians, the regime could apply peer pressure more effectively and indoctrinate more thoroughly. Officers isolated from civilian life were also less likely to hesitate before using force against their own compatriots.

Reza had come from a religious family and had once been an ardent believer in the regime. He would cry during prayers, imagining himself as a potential martyr for Islam. Over years of service, he witnessed the clampdown on protesters—the shootings, arrests, and beatings of Iranians protesting economic collapse and strict morality laws. On the evening of January 8, 2026, amid an internet shutdown, security forces opened fire on crowds demonstrating against widespread shortages and inflation. Thousands were killed across the country, including unarmed protesters shot in hospital beds. The images that emerged horrified both Omid and Reza. Reza said he had wasted ten or eleven years serving what he called a cruel system, and the guilt compelled him to speak despite the risk to his family.

Omid and Reza described secret command centers where high-ranking members of all security units gathered to monitor protests in real time. Massive walls of monitors displayed feeds from countless CCTV cameras across Tehran. Drones provided aerial surveillance. Information from ground forces, social media, and interception devices flowed into these rooms. Plainclothes agents infiltrated protest groups and sometimes redirected marches toward locations where security forces waited in ambush. A representative of the supreme leader had authority to order operations and decide how harshly protesters should be treated. When regular police could not suppress demonstrations, elite units from the Revolutionary Guard and police—dressed entirely in black, faces hidden behind balaclavas—were deployed with military-grade automatic and semiautomatic weapons, even heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks. Amnesty International researcher Raha Bahreini noted that the use of such combat-designed firearms against protesters indicated the killings were intentional.

After months of correspondence, Omid directed DW to an unremarkable location in Shahr-e Rey, on Tehran's outskirts: a prayer hall sandwiched between an occupational therapy practice and a pharmacy. The building is officially named Beit al Shohada, the house of martyrs, but many officers call it Dakhme—meaning crypt or tomb. Omid described how high-ranking officers met beneath its corrugated iron roof to plot operations that bypassed government structures entirely. He said he had attended several meetings there "where decisions about murder are made: It's a killing machine." He listed specific murders and abductions allegedly planned at Dakhme, though DW could not verify these cases. Some of the people he named had indeed died under unresolved circumstances. Omid insisted he had only attended because ordered to do so and had never participated in the operations themselves.

DW could not confirm Dakhme's continued operation. Some experts knew of it in connection with a murder attempt on a reformist president's adviser more than twenty years ago. Others had never heard of it. But experts agreed such a facility was plausible. Miad Maleki, a former US Treasury official who designed sanctions programs targeting Iran, told DW that covert military planning at a place like Dakhme would give the regime plausible deniability for killings. The meetings, Omid said, began under the guise of religious ceremonies in a large hall decorated with green drapes and religious banners. After a communal dinner, only the inner circle remained. Mobile phones were collected and locked away. Then, according to Omid, seasoned specialists from Iran's special forces and intelligence discussed murder and abductions late into the night. "For these people, a person's position isn't that important," he said. "If they consider someone a threat to the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, they take it extremely seriously and take action." After each operation, the men returned to their regular roles within the security apparatus, until summoned again to defend the Islamic Republic at any cost.

DW asked the Iranian Embassy in Berlin and the Supreme Leader's Office to respond to its findings. The Supreme Leader's Office did not reply. The embassy declined to address individual allegations, stating only that "the Islamic Republic of Iran firmly rejects these allegations and the conclusions drawn from them."