The two-page document is potentially explosive. Experts believe it shows the minutes taken during a meeting on September 21 of last year in the northern Iranian city of Sari. During the gathering, senior officials from a number of provincial authorities agreed to pursue a systematic policy of persecution against Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority: the Baha’is.

The Baha’i faith emerged from Islam in the middle of the 19th century. Today it has some five million members worldwide.

But responding to a written enquiry from DW, the German government’s human rights commissioner, Bärbel Kofler, said that in their Iranian homeland the Baha’is are, “the worst treated minority in terms of their human and political rights. They’re viewed as a sectarian political group and persecuted accordingly.”