Three Jews who disappeared after seeking to escape from Iran via Pakistan in 1997 were captured and murdered, Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad concluded based on newly acquired information, The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday.

The three, Nourollah Rabizadeh and brothers Cyrus and Avraham Ghahremani, fled Tehran in February 1997. They were supposed to meet up with a smuggler on the Pakistani border, but disappeared along the way, according to a report in Ynet on Monday.

Newly discovered information led the intelligence agency to conclude that they were captured while escaping and murdered. Their families, which had escaped to Israel via Turkey, were recently informed of the agency’s conclusion. …

Last year, the Mossad revealed that eight Iranian Jews seeking to escape Iran in 1994 under similar circumstances were also captured and killed.

In April, Shahrzad Elghanayan, a Jewish woman whose family emigrated from Iran, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post refuting boasts by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif about Iran’s “tolerance” for Jews, noting that her own grandfather was executed by the regime in 1979 after a 20-minute trial. According to Elghanayan, of the estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Jews who lived in Iran at the time of the revolution, less than 9,000 remain.

[Photo: JewishNewsOne / YouTube ]