Mr. Dahla had just returned from the muddy fields, barefoot, and the agents refused to allow him a moment to rinse off his feet and put his sandals on.

The memory reduces Mr. Mujahid to tears 34 years later.

“Over the years, I have seen a lot of dead bodies in a lot of battles,” he said. He later fought the Communist government, the Soviets and then other jihadis in the civil war, and finally the Taliban. “But this person’s innocence hurts me deeply.”

Mr. Dahla’s son, Mohammada Jan, said his mother and his siblings never fully accepted that their father was dead, though they suspected it. “Even so, when we found out from the Internet that it was confirmed, everyone cried,” he said. Mr. Jan was 15 at the time of his father’s disappearance; he, too, choked up at the memory of his being taken away unshod.

The death lists include victims’ names, dates of death, father’s name, occupation, hometown and the charges against them — usually reduced to one word, including “anarchist,” “fundamentalist,” “Maoist,” “Khomeini.”

The chain of events that led to the lists’ discovery began with an asylum request by Amanullah Osman, the head of interrogation for Afghan intelligence in 1978 and 1979, who fled to the Netherlands in 1993. In his asylum interview, according to the prosecutor’s office, Mr. Osman admitted to signing documents concerning people who were to be executed. “That was expected and desired of me,” he said. “If you don’t go along with it, you can never attain such a high position.”

The Dutch denied him asylum but never expelled him, and eventually opened up a war crimes investigation. That led them to a 93-year-old Afghan refugee in Germany who gave them the death lists, which she had gotten from a former United Nations official, Felix Ermacora, who had never released them. Dutch authorities said they were confident of the lists’ authenticity.

The prosecution was dropped in 2012 when Mr. Osman died, and the Dutch decided to release the lists. “The close relatives of the deceased in this case have the right to know the truth about the circumstances of the disappearance and the final fate of their loved ones,” the prosecutor’s office said.