Cleric and blogger Ahmad Reza Ahmadpour, known as the "Blogging Mullah," has served time in several of Iran’s worst prisons. In that time, he has protested against his sentencing and prison conditions through repeated hunger strikes.
Name: Ahmad Reza Ahmadpour
Career: Cleric, blogger, human rights activist, religious researcher, published and wrote for blog Pezhvak-e Khamoosh (Silent Reflections).
Charges: Spreading lies to mislead the public, propaganda against the regime through interviews with international media, publishing and writing articles and poems on his blog and in domestic publications, membership to the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front and violating the dignity of the clergy.
Ahmad Reza Ahmadpour, a cleric and disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war known as the “Blogging Mullah”, was first arrested on December 27, 2009 in Qom. At the time of his arrest, Ahmadpour and his wife were at the Assembly of Qom Seminary Scholars and Researchers to commemorate Ashura, a holy day for Shias. Agents in plainclothes insulted and physically assaulted Ahmadpour before detaining him.
He was held at the Qom Intelligence Bureau detention center for 11 days, until his case was referred to the assistant prosecutor at the Clergy Court and he was released on bail. During interrogations, he was threatened with eviction from his seminary-owned home and that his stipend would be cut off. Upon his release, he was evicted from his home and banned from leaving the country.
In February 2010 the Clergy Court, presided over by Hossein Bahrami, sentenced him to one year in prison on charges of propaganda against the regime and spreading lies to mislead the public. He was also stripped of his clergy status. He was later acquitted of activities against national security in connection with his email exchanges with the People's Mojahedin of Iran (MKO), a leftist opposition group outside the country, which aims to overthrow the Islamic Republic. In his defense, Ahmadpour said he’d only been accused and charged for this crime because he had received an unsolicited email about the organization.
When Ahmadpour was serving his sentence his left arm was fractured at several points but he wasn’t taken to hospital for two weeks. In protest against conditions in the prison—no protection against hot or cold weather, lack of space, poor health facilities and the torture and humiliation of prisoners—he went on hunger strike for 17 days.
When he was on hunger strike he complained to the UN Secretary-General, describing the appalling conditions in the prison. He concluded in his letter that, “if you ignore this case this hunger strike will cause me to die, and if that happens not only will the officials of the Islamic Republic be my murderers, but I will blame you and you should be held accountable to my family.”
The letter was used as a reason to arrest and imprison him a second time after he completed his first sentence. He was arrested on July 17, 2011 at his home and spent 21 days in solitary confinement. He was sentenced to three years in prison and 10 years in exile and was defrocked a second time. Charges against him included propaganda against the regime, dissemination of lies, activities against national security and communicating with MKO, the same charge that he was acquitted of at his first trial.
In December 2011 Ahmadpour was transferred from Qom Central Prison to the infamous Sepidar Prison in the provincial capital of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war he was exposed to chemical weapons dropped by Saddam Hussein’s forces and as a result, he suffered from respiratory problems. During his incarceration in Sepidar his condition deteriorated and he developed asthma, respiratory allergies, and cardiac problems.
After a few months he was transferred again to another prison in the same province, which, according to him, had worse conditions than Sepidar. A month later he was put in another prison and a year after that, he was taken back to Qom.
He spent five months at Qom’s Saheli Prison, during which he went on hunger strike to protest against the beating of prisoners. They decided to send him to a prison in the central city of Yazd but he resisted this decision by starting another hunger strike. He was moved yet again, without his family being notified.
On July 11, 2013 he started his 10-year exile at Izeh in Khuzestan province, 900 kilometers away from his family. Ahmadpour wrote a letter to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, in which he called on him to turn his back on tyranny and abide the law. For this letter the Clergy Court sentenced him to 100 days in prison, which was suspended for three years.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
Please contact [email protected] with comments, updates or further information about cases.
Read other cases in the series:
visit the accountability section
In this section of Iran Wire, you can contact the officials and launch your campaign for various problems
Interested in writing for IranWire?
Share your stories.
comments