Arash Sadeghi has been arbitrary arrested and imprisoned on multiple occasions over the past 23 years for his activities in defense of human rights in Iran.
The Iranian authorities arrested him again on October 20 for unknown reasons and incarcerated him in Tehran’s Evin Prison, amid a nationwide wave of popular protests calling for more freedoms and women’s rights.
Sadeghi suffers from life-threatening bone cancer. Earlier this month, activists and UN experts expressed alarm over his deteriorating health situation and called for his immediate release from detention.
IranWire has recently received videos of a 2019 interview of Sadeghi that was conducted by Narges Mohammadi, the spokeswoman for the Defenders of Human Rights Center who is currently languishing behind bars.
The activist describes how he has been subjected to coercion and torture while in custody and the circumstances in which his mother was killed at her home by security agents, a memory that both tormented him and made him resistant during his imprisonment.
The day when Sadeghi’s mother died
Sadeghi was 22 when he was first arrested and taken to solitary confinement in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election.
On October 29, 2010, Sadeghi was on a leave of absence from prison when her 42-year-old mother died.
“At 4 a.m. [the agents] banged on the door. It took a while for my mother and sister to open the door,” Sadeghi tells Mohammadi. “They partly broke the glass of the main door, opened and entered. My mother wanted to stop them. They struck my mother on her chest, her head hit the bed’s bar, and she sustained an internal hemorrhage and suffered cardiac arrest. I wept for around 20 minutes over the body of my mother.”
An interrogator breaks Sadeghi’s ribs
In another part of the interview, Sadeghi talks about his beating by “Seyed”, the Intelligence Ministry’s interrogator who was dealing with detained students at Evin Prison’s Ward 209. It happened after his mother had been killed by security agents.
Seyed claimed to be a war veteran who had been wounded during the Iran-Iraq conflict in the 1980s, the activist says. The interrogator was almost 1 meter 85 tall, weighed around 120 kilograms and was missing a finger.
“[Seyed] stood up and started beating me. Two of my ribs broke. The pain was excruciating. After returning to my cell, I went on hunger strike. I had a fever as well. My body was very hot, and I was sweating. I was not feeling well at all”.
At Evin Prison’s Ward 2A, which is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Sadeghi was questioned by another interrogator named Rauof. He was assisted by three men whose job was to beat prisoners.
Sadeghi says Rauof’s team subjected him to every kind of violence and humiliation, including beatings, threats of rape, and heaping profanities on his parents. The first thing that Rauof told Sadeghi when they first encountered each other was, “This is [Ward] 2A and god can’t hear you”.
Sadeghi says that he filed two complaints against Rauof: “I’ll never forget: they took the paper, forced it into my mouth and said that I must swallow it. They grasped my throat, and I swallowed part of the paper”.
Calls to prayer used as torture
Sadeghi’s jailers continued to try to extort false confessions from Sadeghi. Once, a member of Rauof’s team known as Majid “Buffalo” threw the activist to a wall covered with ceramic tiles.
“My head broke and started to bleed. Rauof came and mockingly said, ‘What happened? You hit your head on the wall?’ They took me to 2A’s clinic, just stuck a patch on my head and brought me back to the interrogation room”, he says.
In the interview, Sadeghi tells Mohammadi that his jailers used deliberate sleep deprivation as a form of torture. When he was falling asleep, they would suddenly open the cell’s door and take him to the interrogation room.
He speaks of another kind of psychological torture: “In every and each cell there was a loudspeaker that blasted the call to prayer. Even now the call to prayer stresses me out.”
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