Nazila Fathi
The New York Times
February 1, 2010
Every Thursday since last April, Davoud Rahmanipour traveled to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran for a weekly visit with his son, Arash, 19, who was being held there while his lawyer appealed his death sentence.
The elder Mr. Rahmanipour was unsettled last Thursday to hear from prison authorities that his son had been transferred to a different prison. His misgivings gave way to shock and grief that afternoon when he heard, on state-run television, that his son had been hanged that day at dawn.
“We are in a devastating psychological and physical situation,” Mr. Rahmanipour said Monday in a tearful voice during a telephone interview.
He told Al Jazeera television on Friday that he was refusing to accept messages of condolence. “My son is a martyr for democracy,” he said…
…With the government’s opponents planning another large demonstration on Feb. 11, the country is bracing for another wave of executions. At least nine other prisoners have been charged with the capital crime of moharebeh, which means waging war against God.
“The executions are clearly a sign of the government’s frustration to end the protests,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a group based in the United States. “There are fears that the government might engage in the kind of cleansing that it did between 1980 and 1988, when it executed more than 3,000 political prisoners.”…
The entire article is at the New York Times.
And, from the Guardian in London, an interactive site:
Iran election: faces of the dead and detained
We want to put a face to each of those hundreds – possibly thousands – killed or arrested since the Iranian election.
Since the disputed presidential election on 12 June, the Iranian authorities have detained more than a thousand opposition supporters, journalists and protestors. There have also been a number of deaths.
[In the interactive graphic on this page ] are the dead and detained where we are able to identify them. These are the cases cited by western and Iranian-based human rights and campaign groups, in news reports and by our users–often directing us to these sources. We thank everyone who has participated.
Where we have a picture we have used it. But our information is incomplete…
Go to the Guardian to see more and to submit information if you have any about these individuals.
