Mother Of Man Who Died Under Torture In Iran Released From Detention

In its report last week based on interviews with former detainees, France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), a non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on Iran's Kurdish areas, alleged that torture like attaching weights to testicles, hanging detainees from the ceiling, and beating them with hoses and cables was “prevalent.”

The KHRN cited an intelligence ministry detention center in Orumiyeh, West Azarbaijan province, and two IRGC centers in Orumiyeh and Sanandaj, both in Kurdistan province. It said one detention center had very small cells known as graves.

The ex-detainees told KHRN that interrogators had used threats − including raping the detainees' families − to extract confessions. One detainee, who said he had been held at the IRGC detention center in Sanandaj, told KHRN that he was not taken to hospital for 29 days despite having been shot in the leg. Detainees also said interrogators also staged fake executions to encourage confessions.

Former Kurdish political prisoner Mohammad-Hossein Rezaei, who spent time at the intelligence ministry's Sanandaj detention center, told KHRN that he had been tied to a table and beaten with cables, damaging his nose and ribs.

Roya Toloui, a Kurdish journalist and civil rights activist now living in the US has claimed that after her arrest in 2006 she was tortured and raped in at intelligence ministry detention center of Sanandaj for refusing to put her signature on confessions that had been written by her interrogators.

The report said the IRGC intelligence in West Azerbaijan province had the capacity to detain several hundred.

Several illegal Kurdish parties seeking either Kurdish autonomy within a federal Iran or an independent state are active in Iran’s Kurdish regions. Iranian military commanders have issued repeated warning in recent months they will strike the bases of these groups in Kurdish-held northern Iraq.

While conditions in jails in Kurdish regions are generally harsher than elsewhere, there has been some international interest in Iranian prison conditions since the release in August by hackers of footage from security cameras that had been installed in Evin prison, Tehran, at the instruction of parliament. Mohammad-Mehdi Haj-Mohammadi, the head of Iran's Prisons Organization, apologized and said action would be taken against staff mistreating prisoners.

In a series of tweets in September, activist-cum-citizens’ journalist Sepideh Gholian (Qolian), out on parole from Bushehr prison, southern Iran, alleged abuse of female prisoners in the prison. She wrote that she had reported 20 cases to the authorities, including five described in her tweets, but had received no response.

Molavi Abdolhamid is the religious leader of Iran’s largely Sunni Baluch population living in the southeast near Pakistan and Afghanistan. Over the years, he was an outspoken defender of equal rights for all religions and ethnic groups in Iran but since the Taliban victory in August has become a supporter of the extremist group implicated n hundreds of attacks on civilians.

Abdolhamid in an interview with a local website has called on other countries not “to pre-judge the Taliban”, arguing that the group has changed, and its critics are exaggerating their shortcomings.

Iran’s ruling hardliners also welcomed the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, labeling it as a “strategic defeat for the United States”, but officials now are more circumspect, demanding that the Taliban should form an “inclusive government”.

Abdolhamid’s pro-Taliban statements have led to criticism among Iranians. An Iranian rights group which had bestowed an award on the Sunni cleric for defending human rights took it back in August.

The Taliban have continued their restrictive policies against women in Afghanistan and in some provinces have mistreated Shiite minorities.

Earlier this week, media claimed the federation had suggested draft legislation to allow women to be spectators, after a 40-year ban. But the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) reported Saturday that the federation had denied these reports, which had cited the federation’s own officials.

It was not immediately clear whether the federation had back-pedalled due to political pressure from conservatives who oppose women at games.

Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in 2006 that a ban on women’s attendance, introduced after the 1979 Revolution, would be lifted, but he backed down after objections from senior Muslim clerics.

FIFA, the international football or soccer federation, has been calling on Iran to relax the rule and allow women into stadiums. A select number of women were allowed to attend World Cup qualifying games in 2018.

But lack of further progress led to FIFA considering banning Iran from international games, which led the government to allow around 3,000 women − a small fraction of the attendance − to watch a game between Iran and Cambodia two years ago, in October 2019, exactly 38 years after women were first banned in October 1981.

Women soccer fans were encouraged that things were moving in the direction they wanted. But in restricting attendance at all sports, the Covid-19 pandemic also stopped the trend toward allowing women in Iran to attend games.

A strict version of Islamic and cultural tradition restricts women’s contact with men, and a sports stadium packed with male spectators and where woman watch men compete, alarms many conservative clerics.

But women know that before the 1979 revolution they were allowed to do many things they are barred from today, including not wearing hijab, riding a bicycle, even a motorcycle and holding high level government jobs.

But FIFA is likely to renew its pressure. Recently, Iran announced that all attendance was banned in an international match against South Korea in Tehran, but the people were allowed to watch the game in cinema theatres.

Ostensibly, the ban on stadium attendance was for the pandemic, but many pointed out that cinemas were just as conducive, if not more so, to spreading coronavirus.

Ratcliffe − who has encamped since Sunday in a tent outside the entrance of the foreign office in Whitehall, London − met Thursday with Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Tulip Siddiq, the member of parliament for Ratcliffe’s north London constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn.

“Going on hunger strike is the absolute last resort for anyone, and Richard told me that he feels there is no other option left, because he feels our government’s response to his wife’s case has been pitiful,” Siddiq said ahead of the meeting.

Ratcliffe went on a 15-day hunger strike in 2019, which he claims led to the couple’s daughter returning from Iran, where she was staying with grandparents.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had worked for the BBC World Service Trust training ‘citizen journalists’ and for Reuters-Thomson Foundation, was sentenced in April to a year in jail after conviction for spreading “propaganda against the system.” She previously served around two years of a five-year term, following conviction in 2016 on spying charges, before being given a series of furloughs.

Zaghari-Ratcliffelost an appeal against the recent sentence in September. “Instead of threatening to return Nazanin to prison Iran must release her permanently so she can return home,” the British Foreign Office said in a statement.

On Wednesday Zabihollah Kohdaeian, spokesman of the Iranian judiciary, said the one-year sentence was final but had not been referred for enforcement.

Ratcliffe insists UK ministers are "too timid" in efforts on behalf of his wife and has repeatedly linked the case to the British government’s failure to repay £400 million ($550 million) owed to Tehran after failing to deliver Chieftain tanks in the 1970s.

Ratcliffe’s disquiet with the British prime minister Boris Johnson goes back to 2017 when Johnson, then home secretary, told parliament that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists in Iran, a claim Johnson later retracted but which was cited in the legal case in Tehran.

Ratcliffe has recently charged that his wife’s plight has been considered less important than talks in Vienna designed to revive the 2015 agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program.

“My criticism of the British government is they’ve not prioritized the safety of British citizens in the course of their nuclear negotiations, in the course of their discussions with Iran and other stuff’s been more important,” he told the BBC.

“Iran conducts its diplomatic business through hostage-taking, in part because it is cost-free,” he told the Guardian 19 September.

Former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt told parliament Wednesday that Zaghari-Ratcliffe would not be able to leave Iran until the UK government returned the money paid for the tanks. "When are we going to repay that debt?” he asked.

The Human Rights Activists’ News Agency (HRANA) a monitoring group based abroad quoted “an informed source” on Friday that a court set his bail at 3 billion rials ($11,000) but outside pressures have kept the assailant behind bars.

The Revolutionary Guard colonel identified unofficially as Ayyub Alizadeh, walked on the stage on October 23 during the inauguration of a new governor, General Abedin Khorram, and slapped him hard in the face. The reason for his daring act has never been officially disclosed, but some have said he was angry that Khorram had denied him a promotion.

Official media reported that he was angry for a personal reason unrelated to Khorram. According to HRANA, interrogators are now pressuring him to make a confession along those lines.

The unidentified source told the human rights monitoring group that Alizadeh is under pressure and might have even been beaten to make a false confession.

Despite censorship, Iranian media did report the incident, which was an embarrassment for the Revolutionary Guard.