Rights Group Says 2,300 Protests In Iran, 1,676 Arrests In 2021

Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, said in a tweetthat she is being interrogated since November 24, adding that espionage for Saudi Arabia has been added to her charges.

Mohammadi, who has been arrested several times in the past, was detained again in mid-November this year at the death anniversary of a citizen, Ebrahim Ketabdar, who was shot dead by security forces during the November 2019 protests.

Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin Prison in September 2020 after serving five and half years on trumped up charges, without due process of law.

She was detained twice before this year, once for participating in a rally in front of the interior ministry during week-long water protests in Khuzestan and again at an anti-Taliban rally outside the Pakistan embassy in Tehran in September. She was freed both times after a few hours.

In March, the chairman of Amnesty International in Norway announced that two members of the Norwegian parliament have nominated the Iranian human rights activist for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Xiyue Wang says the university officials did not help him, and even tried to keep his wife from publicizing his case following his arrest on bogus charges of spying for the United States.

Princeton lawyers and administrators urged him not to seek refuge in the Swiss embassy in Tehran after he began to fear for his safety so that the university could maintain its political relations with Iran, Wang alleges in his lawsuit.

He has identified Princeton scholar Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, who is sympathetic to the Iranian regime, claiming that he stymied efforts to free him from prison.

Mousavian – now a visiting research scholar at Princeton, was Tehran’s ambassador to Germany when four Iranian dissidents were assassinated at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in 1992.

He served in a variety of positions Iranian diplomatic position. He attended the funeral service of Qasem Soleimani, the IRGC commander who was killed by American forces last year.

Xiyue Wang was arrested in Iran in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Evin Prison. He was freed in December 2019 in exchange for Iranian scientist Masoud Soleimani, who was imprisoned in the US, for attempting to export biological materials to Iran without authorization.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside his home chanting “A martyr never dies”, according to a video published by a human rights monitoring group.

Earlier, hundreds of people in Kamyaran had signed a letter addressed to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei asking him to commute Qorbani’s death sentence.

He was arrested in October 2016 after several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were killed close to Kamyaran.

Among the charges against him were the murder of three IRGC members and "taking up arms against the state" through membership in the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), an armed opposition group. During his trial, he had rejected any connection with any political party, carrying arms, and involvement in the killings.

The government has intensified arrests and disappearances of Kurdish citizens and activists in recent months.

A human rights group has published an audio recording in which Qorbani talks about his torture in prison, including hanging from the ceiling while his head is put into a plastic bag.

According to Kurdisatn province justice department, Qorbani was executed at dawn on December 19, in Sanandaj prison after years of contention between human rights activists and Iran’s hardline Judiciary.

Qorbani had been arrested back in October 2016 after several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were killed close to his hometown, the small city of Kamyaran.

Among the charges laid against him were the murder of three IRGC members and "taking up arms against the state" through membership in the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), an armed opposition group. During his trial, he had rejected any connection with any political party, carrying arms, and involvement in the killings.

The government has intensified arrests and disappearances of Kurdish citizens and activists in recent months.

In 2018, the Iranian state-run Press TV aired by Qorbani for being an accessory to murder, and late in 2019, he was given the death sentence as well as a total of 90 years in jail plus 200 lashes.

However, according to his lawyer and Amnesty International his tainted confessions were obtained under torture, and he was not given a fair trial.

In a video posted to social media last week, Gohar Eshghi said she was pushed over steel bars on the side of a street by two motorcyclists as she was going to her son's grave. With large bruises under her eyes and a bandaged forehead, Eshghi said one of the motorcyclists dismounted, pushed her, and she passed out: "When I came to, I was in hospital."

A week later, on December 16, Iranian state television aired a video, which it said was from close-circuit cameras (CCTV), showing a woman resembling Eshghi from behind, swaying, staggering, and falling over the steel bars. No motorcyclists were in sight, but passers-by rushed to help, and called an ambulance.

The television program, 20:30, also interviewed the ambulance driver, and witnesses who said they saw Eshghi faint and fall.

"They are lying,” Eshghi told New York-based rights activist Masih Alinejad on Instagram following the TV program. “Why didn't they [show footage] from these cameras the first day? Why didn't they check their security cameras when my Sattar was killed to find my son's murderer?"

Some posts on social media claim the quality of the images suggests they were taken by “a professional camera” and not CCTV.

Eshghi, who holds Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei responsible for her son Sattar’s death, has set up a foundation in her son's memory that she says she had been under pressure to shut down. She was detained for five days in June.

Eshghi's 35-year-old son, Sattar Beheshti, a laborer, was arrested by police in 2012 due to his blog, My Life for My Iran, and social media posts. Beheshti's last blog post published a day before his arrest was a critical letter addressed to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in which he called Iran's Judiciary "a slaughterhouse" that aimed to terrorize the Iranian people into submission and silence. He also claimed he had been threatened by “intelligence bodies”to shut his “big mouth.”

Charged with security offences, he died in detention a few days after his arrest, and after he had submitted a signed complaint that he had been tortured.

A postmortem identified the cause of his death as internal bleeding. Beheshti was buried by security forces in his hometown of Robat Karim, about 30 km from Tehran. Authorities denied allegations of torture and attributed his death to "natural causes", but 41 political prisoners at Evin prison signed a letter claiming his injuries had resulted from “hanging from the ceiling and severe beating.”