Whereabouts of Arrested Iranian Journalist Samimi Unknown

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately release Keyvan Samimi, a 74-year-old dissident journalist who was arrested last week before he was scheduled to speak at a virtual conference.

In a statement on April 24, the New York-based media freedom watchdog also urged the authorities to drop any charges against Samimi and to release all members of the press incarcerated for simply doing their work. 

Samimi was arrested in Tehran on April 20 and taken to an undisclosed location, three months after his release from prison following two years of incarceration.

"We still have no further information on the [security] service responsible for his arrest or his whereabouts," his family told AFP.

Authorities said he was arrested for having “connections with hostile anti-state groups in exile,” but they did not say whether he had been formally charged. 

The journalist was due to address on April 21 the panel discussion "Dialogue to Save Iran,” which was organized by a group of Iranian journalists and university professors.

A former editor of the now-banned intellectual magazine Iran-e Farda (Iran Tomorrow), Samimi has been imprisoned several times, before and after Iran's 1979 revolution.

He was detained in December 2020 to serve a three-year sentence and was released in January this year.

In February 2022, Samimi was provisionally released from prison due to health issues but was re-incarcerated in May.

According to CPJ, Iranian authorities have arrested at least 95 other journalists since anti-government protests erupted across the country following the death in police custody of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini.

“Members of the press must be allowed to live without constant fear that they will be harassed and detained,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.