Iranian activists probing the fates of detainees during protests and other unrest that erupted late last month reported on January 7 that 22-year-old Sina Ghanbari had died in prison of "unknown causes.”
The activists, who include lawyers and volunteers including individuals caught in past crackdowns like the one after a disputed presidential election in 2009, say their self-styled committee was informed of Ghanbari's death by other detainees following their release. Well after the unconfirmed reports, the head of the prison authority in Tehran Province on January 8 said that Ghanbari had hanged himself in a prison lavatory.
"On the morning of Saturday, January 6, one of the prisoners, Sina Ghanbari, son of Ali Akbar, visited the lavatory of the quarantine section and hanged himself," Mostafa Mohebi told the semiofficial ISNA news agency. Suicide always is official excuse for the deaths of torture victims inside the notorious Evin Prison.
Mohebi said a prosecutor had come to the prison and interviewed "prison guards and those informed" while also issuing "necessary orders."
The activists committee said via an announcement by activist Mehdi Mahmudian, a journalist and member of the reformist Participation Front who spent time in jail in 2009, that Ghanbari had been held in the quarantine section of Tehran's Evin prison, where detainees are frequently held before being taken to a general ward.
Fears Of Another Kahrizak
Mahmudian was reportedly crucial in informing the public about the abuses at Kahrizak, a detention facility where abuses were alleged in 2009. Two Iranian lawmakers subsequently confirmed Ghanbari's death and suggested that the young man had committed suicide while in detention but did not offer details.
"This 22-year-old young man was arrested by the police. I was informed that he had committed suicide in jail," reformist lawmaker Tayebeh Siavashi was quoted as saying by the semiofficial ILNA news agency.
Another reformist lawmaker, Mahmud Sadeghi, made a similar statement to Etemadonline, saying that he had been informed through an unnamed "intelligence official" that Ghanbari had committed suicide in Evin.
Writing on Twitter, Sadeghi warned Iranian officials about a repeat of events following the 2009 protests, when reports emerged of detainees held at the Kahrizak detention center in Tehran being tortured and raped. At least three of those detainees died as the result of torture, rights groups reported.
"I'm warning the president along with judiciary and intelligence officials of a second Kahrizak," Sadeghi tweeted. At least 22 other deaths have been reported in connection with the December-January protests but Ghanbari's is the first report of a death in custody.
"This news is like a knife stabbing the hearts of those whose young ones are in prison," said Mohammad Aghazadeh, whose son, Soheil Aghazadeh, is among some 80 students arrested recently. "Even if [the news] is true, what did you do to them that they prefer to die than to tolerate your actions?" Aghazadeh asked in a separate tweet.
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| Student protesters inside the Teheran University in Iran. |
Some of the detained students were reportedly not among the protesters, but details are difficult to confirm due to official secrecy and restrictions on reporting in Iran. An Iranian lawmaker said on January 5 that the authorities said that most of the students had been arrested as a "preventive measure."
Iranian authorities said that at least 450 people were arrested over a three-day span after the protests began in western Iran in late December. Subsequent reports suggest that well over 1,500 people have been arrested across the country, with some estimates much higher.
Dozens of detainees are said to have been released in recent days. However, hundreds remain in jail, and little has been said officially about their conditions. Authorities have warned some of the families of those arrested not to speak to the media.
Kasra Nuri, a member of the Sufi Gonabadi order who previously spent several years in prison for his activism, is among those arrested. His mother, Shokoufeh Yadollahi, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda that Nuri had not participated in any of the recent antiestablishment protests.
"It's not clear why he was arrested. Kasra and three of his friends had gone to the Dey hospital [in Tehran] to visit a friend when security forces arrested them while using electric shockers and firing shots into the air," Yadollahi said in a telephone interview.
She added that her son was being held in Section 209 of Evin prison. Yadollahi and family members of him and of other detainees have gathered in front on the prison to appeal for their release. Amnesty International demanded on January 4 that Iranian authorities "protect hundreds of detainees from torture and other ill-treatment."
"Given the alarming scale of the current wave of arrests, it is highly likely that many of those held are peaceful protesters who have been detained arbitrarily and now find themselves in prisons where conditions are dire and torture (including gang-rapes of both men and women) is a common tool to extract confessions and punish dissidents," Amnesty International's research and advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa, Philip Luther, said.
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| Police entered the Teheran University and arrested many students male and female. |
(CNN)The University of Tehran is working to track and secure the release of its students who were arrested for taking part in recent anti-government protests in Iran, according to the semiofficial Iranian Students' News Agency.
"A committee has been established to follow up on and track Tehran University's detained students' situation Our aim is to work with relevant authorities and facilitate the quickest release and return of those students to their studies and family embrace," Majid Sarsanghi, the University of Tehran's deputy chancellor for cultural affairs, is quoted by the news agency.
It's not clear how many students have been arrested in connection with the protests, which broke out more than a week ago. At least 21 people were killed, many in clashes with security forces trying to quell the rallies.
Authorities in Iran have said 450 people have been detained. The US State Department has put the number held at 1,000. Tehran public prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said Sunday that about 70 defendants had been released on bail in the last 48 hours, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
Reformist Iranian lawmaker Mahmood Sadeqi told the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency that he holds details on detained students. But he said he does not know the whereabouts of 10 of the 90 who he believes were detained from across the country.
"On the basis of our figures, at least 58 students from different Tehran universities have been detained so far and the strange point is that many of them are not involved in any political activities at all," he said. Sadeqi told ILNA he had spoken to the Ministry of Intelligence and hoped that most of the students would be released soon.
Rights group Amnesty International accused Iran of having an "appalling" track record of carrying out mass arbitrary arrests of peaceful demonstrators.
"Given the alarming scale of the current wave of arrests, it is highly likely that many of those held are peaceful protesters who have been detained arbitrarily and now find themselves in prisons where conditions are dire and torture is a common tool to extract confessions and punish dissidents," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's research and advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Four UN human rights experts on Friday urged Iran to respect protesters' rights and allow freedom of expression and assembly. The protests, the most powerful challenge to the regime in years, appeared to have fizzled Thursday after Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Ali Jafari asserted the unrest was officially over. Mass pro-government rallies have taken their place in many Iranian cities. Government supporters turned out in force in Tehran and elsewhere Friday.
(Afshin, a shopkeeper from south-west Iran, alleges that one of his friends was beaten and repeatedly raped after being arrested at an opposition rally after last month's disputed election. He gave this account to Esfandiar Poorgiv, a journalist and academic.)
He came to my shop around 10.30am. You
could tell straight away that he had just been released. His face was bruised
all over. His teeth were broken and he could hardly open his eyes.
He was not even into politics. He was
just an ordinary 18-year-old in the last year of school. Before the election he
came to me and asked how he should vote. He looks up to me. His father is an
Ahmadinejad supporter.
He had gone home directly after his
release, but his father did not let him in. He didn't mention he had been
raped. At first, he didn't tell me either. It was the doctor who first noticed
it and told me.
When he came to my shop he collapsed in
a chair. He said he had nowhere to go and asked if he could stay with me. I
called a friend of mine who is a doctor to come home and see him. Then I
brought him home.
His shoulder blades and arms were
wounded. There were some slashes on the face. No bone fractures, but he was
bruised all over the body. I wanted to take some photos but he did not let me.
The doctor said only four of his teeth were intact, the rest were broken. You
could hardly understand what he said.
Then the doctor told me what had happened. He had suffered rupture of
the rectum and the doctor feared colonic bleeding. He suggested we take him to
the hospital immediately.
They registered him under a false name
and with somebody else's insurance. The nurses were crying. Two of them asked
what sort of beast had beaten him up like that. He was a broken man. He told us
not to waste our money on him, and that he would kill himself.
He was arrested in Shiraz on 15 June,
the Monday after the election. Some sturdy young men made a human shield around
the demonstrators. He was among them. He said he managed to hit some of the
anti-riot police. But then they caught him and beat him up.
"I was kept in a van till evening
that day and then transferred to a solitary cell where I was kept for two
days," he said. "Then I was repeatedly interrogated, beaten and hung
from a ceiling. They call it chicken kebab. They tie your hands and feet
together and hang you from the ceiling, turning you around and beating you with
cables.
"They gave us warm water to drink
and one meal a day. Repeated smacking was a regular punishment. In
interrogations, they kept on asking if I was instructed from abroad. I believed
I was going to be sent from the detention centre to prison. But they sent me to
where they called Roughnecks' Room. There were some other youths of my age in
there. I asked a guard why I am not sent to prison and the reply was: 'You have
to be our guest for a while.'
"I refused to confess during
interrogations. They said: 'Ask your friends what we'll do to you if you don't
co-operate.' Others in the room were also arrested on 15 June. I was tempted to
confess at this point but I didn't. On the third and fourth day, they beat me
up again. They insisted we were instructed from abroad. I kept on saying we
were only protesting for our votes.
"It was on Saturday or Sunday that they raped me for the first
time. There were three or four huge guys we had not seen before. They came to
me and tore my clothes. I tried to resist but two of them laid me on the floor
and the third did it. It was done in front of four other detainees.
"My cell mates, especially the
older one, tried to console me. They said nobody loses his dignity through such
an act. They did it to two other cell mates in the next days. Then it became a
routine. We were so weak and beaten up that could not do anything.
"Then the interrogations started
again. They said: 'If you don't come to your senses we will send you to Adel
Abad [another prison in Shiraz] to the pederasts' section so that you receive
such treatment every day.' I was so weak I did not know what to say. Then they
asked for my contacts. I told them I had no contacts and I was informed about
the demonstrations through the internet.
"The same routine was continued till this morning when I was
released. In the last week, there was no interrogation, no beating. Only rape
and solitary confinement."
This is what he recounted. But he
couldn't articulate quite like this. He was in much physical and mental pain as
he talked. I asked him to tell his story in the hope of making a difference to
those still detained.
TORONTO, Canada—Azar Alkana has come to
terms with all the other torture and pain she endured in an Iranian jail. But
recovering from the experience of being raped by a guard at the prison, where
she was condemned because of her husband’s membership in a Kurdish rebel
groups, has been impossible.
“I am over all the other forms of
torture and the pain my little daughter went through in those years,” Alkana,
who spoke under the pseudonym Nina Aghdam, said to Iranian documentary
filmmaker Reza Alallamehzade. “But the psychological breakdown that rape causes
is incomparable and irrecoverable,” she said.
Human rights organizations have
recently expressed alarm about the rise of sexual assault on women prisoners in
Iranian jails. According to the Kurdpa News agency, university student Hananeh
Farhadi committed suicide after spending two months in an Iranian intelligence
agency prison. Her family was warned by
authorities not to publicise her case.
Shadieh Basami, 23, from Bisaran village, in Sanandaj province, set
herself on fire after being raped by a soldier from the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards, she told Kurdpa. Sorour, who uses a pseudonym, is a Kurdish woman from
Mahabad who told an Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center that she was
arrested for her membership in the Kurdish dissident group Komala, and that she
was sexually assaulted in a Tabriz prison.
“After swearing by my ethnicity, the
Iranian guard raped me using a bottle,” she says. “The physical injury was
eventually healed but the psychological one never did.” Sorour says that for
months following her release she contemplated suicide. “I tremble every time I
remember that incident.”
Minoo Homily, from Sanandaj, was
imprisoned in 1982 at the age of 17, for her communist beliefs. In Isfahan,
where she was later transferred, she says she was sexually assaulted by a male
guard while her female warden was away for a few minutes.
Homily, an outspoken activist who now
lives in Toronto, believes that recovering from the psychological harm was lengthy
and difficult and that the pain worsened when her ex-husband started to abuse
her for her experience in prison.
“He would say that I was touched by the
Revolutionary Guards and therefore have no value as a human being,” she
recalled. Homily says her reason for talking about her experience is to
encourage other female prisoners to speak up.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
told his country’s state-funded Press TV, after foreign media reported
increasing sexual assaults in Iranian prisons, that rape or torture of
political prisoners in Iranian prisons is carried out by “enemy” agents, not
the government. Iran's conservative parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, said
following a “comprehensive inquiry” that "no cases of rape or sexual
abuse" had been found in the prisons.
Salih says that Kurdish women suppress
their rape stories in order to preserve their family honor. “Kurdish women,
unlike women of Rwanda, Cambodia and other target groups of genocide, do not
admit to the sexual invasion they have suffered. They feel obliged to preserve
the family honor,” she added.
A victim of rape in an Iranian prison who
did not want to be identified, told Rudaw that fear is a major factor behind
many women’s silence. “It’s hard enough to live with this shame forever,” she
said. “But if we mention it in public, we might even get killed by radical
members of the family.”
Golaleh Kamangar, a Kurdish activist in
Norway, says that in a conservative society where a family’s name and honor is
often tied to women, former female prisoners committing suicide is inevitable. “In
a strictly patriarchal culture, that every aspect of a woman’s life is directly
related to ‘honour,’ victims of rape find themselves in a conundrum,” she says.
Kamangar says that “victims of rape are not criminals,” and that people
need to understand this. “For as long as victims of rape terminate their lives,
the oppressive regime will continue to use sexual harassment as a powerful tool
against the dissidents,” says Kamangar.