We Felt We Were in Abu Ghraib, Not Evin

Relatives of prisoners who were injured in the recent raid on Evin Prison’s Cell Block 350 were allowed visitation rights yesterday. They recounted horrific scenes of seriously wounded inmates in a visiting hall that resembled a hospital ward, strewn with battered bodies in casts and bandages. Prison officials, some members of the parliament and the Justice Ministry continue to deny that the detainees, most of them prisoners of conscience, were beaten in the April 17th storming of the cell block.

“I declared many times that the [Thursday] inspection was conducted with full compliance with laws and regulations,” said Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, head of the Prisons Bureau. “There were no clashes or beatings by our colleagues. They did not even touch them.”

But several family members who visited their relatives in the prison spoke later to Iranwire and described a ward where many could not walk unless helped by other inmates.

“When I entered the visiting room, my heart almost stopped,” said the wife of imprisoned lawyer Amir Eslami to IranWire. “I was overcome with nausea. Some prisoners in the hall had broken legs and a prisoner’s hand was bandaged. The neck of Akbar Amini [a jailed protester] was in a cast, broken. When his mother saw him, she fainted and was carried out of the hall. My husband told me that on Thursday the cell block resembled Abu Ghraib.”

“There are prisoners who have been injured but don’t dare to go to the clinic,” she said, quoting her husband. “They’re afraid that if they do they will end up in solitary.”

Mrs. Eslami challenged officials, including the hardline MP Mehdi Koochakzadeh, who have called news coverage of the attacks a fabrication. “If you deny the reports then how come you were not present at the visiting hall today? Why don’t you allow an MP to visit the prison? Who is behind this?” she said. “From the leader of this country down, everybody denies the reports. How dare the officials beat our loved ones and then deny it? They accused the prisoners of endangering national security but I ask: What did they do in prison against national security?”

The BBC is to Blame

After news of the beatings at Cell Block 350 emerged, Koochakzadeh met with the families of four prisoners. “They had no reliable news about the beatings,” he told a Persian news website after his meetings. “They only said that they had heard about it from the BBC Persian Service.”

Ali Motahari, an MP who is outspoken on some citizens' rights issues, met with prisoners’ families before parliament, but has not been allowed to visit Cell Block 350. “Why don’t they allow him to visit?” said Elsami. “Wherever I go, they tell me I am quoting from the Constitution and the Koran, that I’m quoting books. They say, ‘we receive our orders from somewhere else.’”

On Sunday, when a group of relatives had gathered before parliament, Motahari came out and offered his explanation for the raid. “There are two possibilities,” he said, according to accounts of those present. “Either they botched the situation or they want to create problems for the new government. It was not necessary to condemn people to six or eight years of prison simply because they participated in a rally. We believe that if this problem is solved as soon as possible such things would not happen.”

In the wake of the Prisons Bureau denial, 22 relatives of prisoners wrote a letter to Motahari and asked him to do “whatever it takes” to clarify what happened.

“When they pulled up the curtains and we saw our relatives, everybody started weeping,” Atefeh Khalafi, the wife of the human rights activist Hassan Asadi Zeidabadi, told IranWire. “The prisoners told us that the violence was very intense. They are on hunger strike now, demanding that the laws be respected. They did not deserve to become the targets of the officials’ rage.”

Zeidabadi was not attacked, but his wife says she is worried for his safety in such a climate. “I don’t know what could happen to him before next Monday,” she said, referring to the weekly visitation day. Like many, she demanded that the Prison Bureau official, Esmaili, visit the prison personally. “Why doesn’t he go there himself and see what they did to our relatives?”, she said. “We will not allow [them] to perish in prison.”

Hunger Strike

In a statement, twelve prisoners of Cell Block 350 declared that they will go on a hunger strike, effective Tuesday, to protest illegal treatments, the unprecedented and outrageous violations of prisoners’ rights and the spreading of false news.

“Hossein’s hands were slightly injured, but the others were in very bad shape. They had torn the guys apart,” the mother of dissident blogger Hossein Ronaghi told IranWire. “They had injuries on their heads, on their ears and on their necks.”

Her son, Hossein, told her that Colonel Amanian, the head of Tehran Prisons Bureau, was at the cell block at the time of the raid. “They threatened that next time they would kill them” she said. “Whatever the officials have said about Thursday is a lie. They don’t take the prisoners to the hospital because they are afraid that others would witness what shape they are in.”

She was among those family members who had gathered outside the parliament building. “We were sitting there when Koochakzadeh walked out. A few women from Tehran recognized him,” she said. “He said, ‘We don’t have political prisoners. Those who were involved were a bunch of thugs.’ I showed him a picture of Hossein and told him that my son has been a prisoner for five years. He wrote the name down. How come when [in 2009] they came and arrested him with a Justice Ministry warrant they knew him but today nobody knows anything?”

A Routine Inspection

On Sunday April 20th, Sohrab Soleimani, director-general of prisons in the province of Tehran, told IRNA news agency that there had not been any clashes between the guards and the prisoners. “It was just a routine inspection,” he said. “We should not pay any attention to the rumors spread by counter-revolutionaries.”

According to family members who talked to IranWire, authorities have not permitted prisoners phone calls for the past three years, in contravention of regulations that allow for this. The families of many prisoners live in towns hundreds of miles away and can visit them once a month at most. As a result, some prisoners have tried to keep mobile phones in the cell block.

Some have asked officials to permit them to have MP3 players, so that they can listen to music, but their requests have been rejected. This, while cell blocks for non-political prisoners are awash with illegal drugs; if drugs are found, no action is taken against prisoners. Political prisoners are denied books, CDs and DVDs, even though the law allows for them.

On Monday morning Prisons Bureau head Esmaili told reporters that he had been called before the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Affairs Commission to explain the events at Cell Block 350. “We have identified an individual from the cell block who had contacted BBC Persian and had given them an interview,” he said. “The Prison Bureau has opened a case about some prisoners who have spread rumors and we have sent it to the judicial authorities.”

He argued that the prisoners themselves were responsible for the “sabotage” of the inspection. “Some of the prisoners resisted and refused the leave, and as our colleagues moved them, in retaliation, they cursed them, broke the door and inflicted damage.”

The mother of Hosseini Vojdan, a student who has been imprisoned since August 2011, said prisoners had requested the ward supervisor be present when the cells were inspected. “But they forced them out [of their cells] and when they could not find any contraband they ordered the prisoners to take off their clothes so they could inspect them as well,” she said.

When the prisoners did not comply, she said, the officers began beating them. “My son’s shoulder is purple. They beat him with a baton. A little higher and his spinal cord might have been damaged. Who would have been responsible then?”

“He is Not Dead Yet”

Yesterday officials permitted only one person from each family inside the prison to visit, according Mrs. Hosseini. “I asked an MP about my son,” she said. “He answered that ‘nothing has happened. At most he has a broken nose or a broken shoulder. He is not dead yet!’”

Like the relatives of many prisoners, she described an anguished life where she worries for her children’s safety in prison.

“Three years ago seven armed officers came to our home and took my two sons away. If they kill him tomorrow they would say ‘nothing happened; he is just dead'. Our phone calls are monitored. When we leave home they follow us. It seems that they want to force us out of the country. We did not have a revolution so that our children would be beaten in prison. My son’s youth is being wasted in prison. When they took him he was just 18 years old.”

On Monday, Minister of Justice Mostafa Pourmohammadi told reporters at a press conference that “in two cells of Evin Prison the prisoners resisted, which led to problems for them. A couple were slightly injured. The families requested an expedited visit but I have to say that nothing happened to justify an expedited visit.”

At the same time, Mahmoud Alavi, the Minister of Intelligence, said in an interview that his ministry would soon publish a statement about clashes in Cell Block 350. For now, however, the incident remains a political taint on the administration of President Hassan Rouhani, who vowed to work for the release of political prisoners but now faces an unprecedented and brutal raid on his watch.