Iran: Unspeakable torture

شکستن پا و دندان زندانی زیر شکنجه های وحشیانه
گزارش دریافتی: بر اساس اخبار بدست آمده از زندان تبریز به نقل از افرادی که امروز موفق به دیدن حمید والایی، وکیل، مدافع حقوق بشر و نویسنده آذربایجانی شده اند، بر اثر شکنجه های که طی دوازده روز گذشته بر وی وارد شده، دو دندان جلو و دو دندان عقب فک بالای وی شکسته است. همچنین این زندانی بر اثر صدمات وارده به پای راستش که منجر به شکستن آن شده، قادر به حرکت نیست. علاوه بر این بر اثر صدمات وارده به سر وی چندین بار بیهوش شده و در حال حاضر دچار سرگیجه شدید می باشد.

Quick Translation:

The Iranian regime continues to torture dissidents in the most barbaric fashion.

Hamid ValAAie, a human rights lawyer in Tabriz's Prison has been tortured savagely over a a period of 12 days. His interrogators broke four of his teeth (2 in the front and two in back). They broke his right leg and he cannot move. He had also passed out repeatedly during these torture session, and he suffers from severe dizziness.

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Iran: Babol University

یکشنبه ۲۶ فروردین ) ۱۵ نفر متحصنین دانشگاه بابل،که سه تن از آنها در اعتصاب غذا بودند، با یورش نیروهای امنیتی و درگیری آنها با دانشجویان متحصن ‌که در دانشگاه تنها بودند، ربوده شده و به مکان نامعلومی منتقل شدند

Akhbar rooz:--15 university students have been abducted in Mazandaran, Iran.

In a related News: Executing thousands of female opponents, which is unprecedented anywhere in the world. In a recent demonstration by teachers asking for better and equal pay, some 10,000 demonstrators, mostly women, showed up.

Some 1,000 women teachers were arrested in one fell swoop by the Suppression forces and transferred to various prisons. The head of Islamic Iran's National Prisons Organization recently admitted there were over 100 "independent" prisons around the country, each run for their own use by various so-called security or intelligence organizations. Most are only quasi-official and some definitely "illegal" if such a word can be applied to the Islamic administration of Ahmadi-Nejad in particular and the Mullahs in general, where their very presence has illegal roots and foundation.

Finally, Human Rights
Watch demands release of the detained teachers.

Link via sheema

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Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir

Ottawa Citizan: Two Revolutionary Guards came to arrest Marina Nemat on Jan. 15, 1982. She was at home in Tehran, about to take a bath. It was 9 p.m. Marina was just 16.

Marina's problems, as detailed in her new heartbreaking memoir, Prisoner of Tehran, had started two years earlier when she had asked a preachy school teacher to stuff the politics and stick to calculus. Marina was ordered to leave the classroom. Most of the other students trailed after her in solidarity.

Later, Marina attended rallies protesting the Islamic government of Ayatollah Khomeini. She also wrote for a rebellious student newspaper. She was definitely travelling with the wrong crowd, according to the authorities. And she was definitely being watched.
Friends began to be arrested. Marina knew her turn would come. Her sweetheart, Andre, an electrical engineering student, urged her to flee. But there was nowhere to go.

Wrapped in a cashmere shawl and clutching a string of Catholic prayer beads, Marina was taken to Evin Prison, the infamous hellhole where Montreal photo-journalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested, tortured, raped and killed in 2001, simply for taking photographs of a student protest outside the building.

At Evin, Marina was whipped into unconsciousness and then sentenced to death during a secret trial. Just before she could be shot, she was rescued by a guard named Ali she had met the night of her arrest. The world suddenly got even stranger.

For reasons that still baffle Marina today, Ali had fallen madly, obsessively in love with her at first sight. He proposed marriage. Marina had no choice. If she refused or tried to escape through suicide, Ali vowed he would hurt her parents and Andre. Marina was also forced to pretend to convert publicly to Islam from Christianity. She and Ali were married July 23, 1982 in the home of Ali's parents. After a brief "honeymoon" of repeated rapes, Marina was sent back to prison and put in solitary so Ali could visit and spend nights with her.

The marriage was brief. Ali was fatally shot, most likely because of a feud among prison officials. Thanks to the efforts of Ali's parents, Marina was released from Evin, 26 months after her initial arrest. She returned to her own parents' home and soon wed Andre in a Christian church despite a law forbidding her, a supposed Muslim convert, from marrying outside her religion.
The couple arrived in Canada on Aug. 28, 1991. They have two young sons and live in Aurora, near Toronto. And it is from the safety and tranquillity of that suburban home that Nemat wrote her memoir.

Prisoner of Tehran is just now hitting bookstores across Canada. Soon it will be in 16 countries, including the United States and United Kingdom. A British television movie is also in the works. Nemat is writing the screenplay for the prominent London production house, Tiger Aspect.

Nemat is one of the headliners of the eight-day Ottawa International Writers Festival, beginning today at Library and Archives Canada on Wellington Street. The woman who was once simply known by her neighbours as the friendly waitress at a suburban Swiss Chalet is about to become a literary celebrity plus a living symbol of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in post-Shah Iran who were sent to Evin, tortured and, in many cases, executed.

Prisoner of Tehran has been dedicated to various relatives, friends, other political prisoners and the late Zahra Kazemi, the very Canadian woman whose death, Nemat believes, caused the world to take notice, perhaps for the first time, of what was really happening in Iran's prisons.
At the festival, Nemat will be rubbing shoulders with such literary heavyweights as novelists Barbara Gowdy, Rawi Hage, C.S. Richardson and Lawrence Hill, poets Dennis Lee, John Barton, George Bowering and David O'Meara, environmentalist David Suzuki, religion writer Tom Harpur and Ottawa-based social commentator Roy MacGregor...read more

You can order her book by clicking on the picture above or here.

*Watch the movie "A few Simple Shot" about the Iranian Political Prisoners:
by clicking here.

*(Warning: Not for the Squeamish)

Related stories, here and here.

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Iranian Blogger Kianoosh Sanjari if Freed--Describes Torture

Activist Kianoosh Sanjari in his first interview since his release describes his horrific torture at Iran's notorious Evin Prison.

The Belfast Telegraph and Iranian Press News reported today that Iranian activist and blogger Kianoosh Sanjari has been released from Evin Prison. Sanjari, who was first arrested by the regime when he was 17, was re-arrested in October when he went to the home of secular Ayatollah Mohammed Kazemaini Borojerdi. The senior Shi'ite Muslim cleric who had challenged Iran's system of clerical rule and the regime was also arrested by the regime.
Via IPN:

When a bruised Kianoosh Sanjari climbed from the police van last October, he immediately recognised the familiar drab buildings of Evin prison section 240, run by the plainclothes branch of the Revolutionary Guards. His crime? Reporting for his weblog on the violent arrest of a religious group by security forces.

In his first interview since being released Iran's most prominent blogger recalls the rough tactics used against him by the authorities and the backlash against US support for democracy activists in the Islamic Republic.

In early October, Mr Sanjari went to the home in western Tehran of the dissident cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Kazemaini Borojerdi and watched as security forces attacked his followers outside.

"The alley was flooded with broken glass, water, teargas and riot police with batons hitting everybody," he said. "A police van was being used as a battering ram. Our eyes were burning and our faces hurt. I crawled into a camper van where another woman was hiding. I heard people being beaten and knew that in a few seconds, I'd be beaten too. The broken windows cut my side as I was pulled out. I was knocked unconscious."

He spent the next three months in Evin, where he had been interned several times before. He was blindfolded and questioned and slapped by the interrogator, whose questions took a new and sinister turn.

h/t to gatewaypundit

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Islamic Republic of Terrorism's Report Card on Human Rights

The U.S. State Department:

(snip)

Section 1 Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom From:

a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life

There were reports ofexecutions after unfair trials. Exiles and human rights monitors alleged that many of those supposedly executed for criminal offenses, such as narcotics trafficking, were political dissidents.

The law criminalized dissent and applied the death penalty to offenses such as apostasy, "attempts against the security of the State, outrage against high-ranking officials, and insults against the memory of Imam Khomeini and against the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic."

On January 24, according to domestic press reports, two bombs exploded in the city of Ahvaz, in the ethnic Arab majority province of Khuzestan, with as many as nine dead and 40 wounded. On January 28 and February 28, there were further bombings but no casualties reported. The violence came amid social unrest that began with the April 2005 publication of a letter, claimed by the government to be a forgery, alleging government plans to reduce the percentage of the Ahvazi-Arab population in the province. The bombings follow similar bombings in June and October 2005.

On May 11, according to HRW, authorities executed Majid Segound and Masoud Naghi Biranvand, both of whom were age 17 at the time of their execution.

The government responded forcibly to weeks of demonstrations by members of the ethnic Azeri minority, which protested a May 19 newspaper cartoon viewed as offensive to the Azeri population. The government initially denied any protesters were killed, but on May 28 a police official acknowledged that four were killed and 43 injured in the northwestern town of Naqaba.

On July 31, student protester Akbar Mohammadi died in Evin Prison following medical complications related to a hunger strike. Police first arrested Mohammadi following his participation in July 1999 student demonstrations to protest government closure of newspapers. Authorities reportedly denied Mohammadi's parents permission to see their son's body and did not respond to calls for an independent investigation into the cause of death.

In November 2005 an appeals court ordered the case involving the death of Zahra Kazemi, a dual-national Iranian-Canadian citizen, to be reopened; however, at year's end there was no progress and the case remained under review. Kazemi, a photojournalist, was arrested for taking pictures while outside Evin Prison in Tehran during student-led protests. She died in custody in 2003 after allegedly being tortured. Authorities admitted that she died as a result of a blow to the head. In June the Kazemi family filed a civil case against the Iranian government in Canadian courts.

According to a 2005 AI report, during the previous 15 years there were reports of at least eight evangelical Christians killed in the country (see section 2.c.).

During the year there was no statement altering the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps's (IRGC) February 2005 announcement that Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 religious decree calling for the killing of author Salman Rushdie remained in effect.

There was no further action on the killing of strikers in 2004, the killings and disappearances reported by the Special Representative for Iran of the Commission on Human Rights (UNSR) in 2001, or the killings of members of religious minorities following the revolution.

b. Disappearance

Little reliable information was available regarding the number of disappearances during the year.

There were no developments in the October 2005 case of journalist Massoumeh Babapour, found barely alive after being abducted and repeatedly stabbed, after threats calling her an atheist and claiming religious authorities had sentenced her to death....There's more

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