Naser Zarafshan is a writer, translator and lawyer. He is a secretary of the Iranian Writers' Association and he was also the lawyer for the families of some of the victims of the Chain Murders that took place in Iran in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The Chain Murders were a series of political assassinations that began in Iran during the presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989 to 1997) and were orchestrated by the Ministry of Intelligence. The murders targeted and killed prominent Iranian writers and journalists who were critical of the government. The assassinations came to an end after Muhammad Khatami was elected president in 1997. However, the main perpetrators of these killings were never identified or brought to justice.

In March 2001, two years after he began his investigation into the Chain Murders case, Naser Zarafshan was arrested following a legal complaint from the Judiciary Organization of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the institution that deals with crimes committed by members of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Intelligence. Zarafshan was sentenced to five years imprisonment and 50 lashes of the whip.

In his defense statement during the Court of Appeal hearings, Zarafshan wrote: “If the killers are a corrupt and arbitrary group of individuals, why do they enjoy the benefits of a state apparatus which conceals their actions, confessions and statements? And why does anyone who talks about the case of this isolated and anarchic group get intimidated into silence with the threat of being accused of “revealing state secrets”? They told me that if I did not resign from the case, of my own volition, they would prevent me from being involved in the case in other ways.”

Zarafshan also specified in his defense statement that the case had been filed against him to prevent him from intervening and appearing in court as part of the Chain Murders trial. 

He was also sentenced to a three year travel ban which he was to be required to serve after completing his five year prison sentence.

In 2007, Naser Zarafshan won the German Association of Judges’ Human Rights Award. In a video interview, which he conducted after receiving the award, Zarafshan stated that Chain Murders was a project that had been carried out by the “entirety of the Islamic Republic of Iran'', saying: “At the court hearings, the agents from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, who carried out the killings, explicitly stated that “kidnapping and elimination [assassination]” was just one of their duties. They were surprised to see that after all the killings [that they had carried out], there was now a controversy over the last four victims! According to my investigations into the Chain Murders case, there were a total of 66 murders, but in court hearings they only admitted to the murder of 6 people. Eventually, they ruled out the case of both Pirooz Davani and Majid Sharif and said that only [Dariush] Forouhar and his wife [Parvaneh Forouhar/Eskandari], [Mohammad Jafar] Pooyandeh and [Mohammad] Mokhtari were killed by the Ministry of Intelligence [as part of the Chain Murders]. That is simply a lie. The Chain Murders was by no means an arbitrary and anarchic act by a handful of agents, as the killers mentioned in court the names of two deputies and three directors in the Ministry of Intelligence who ordered and coordinated the killings. They [the agents from the Ministry of Intelligence] said: 'We had no knowledge of the victims at all. We acted according to the list which they gave us.' The court prosecutor also told me that Fallahzadeh, the then Deputy Minister of Intelligence, dealt out the cards [gave out the orders to commit murder].”

Hojjatoleslam Fallahzadeh is the current Deputy of Social and Political Affairs for the Ministry of Intelligence in Hassan Rouhani's government.