NCRI – Faced with domestic and international crises, the clerical regime has stepped up pressures and torture against steadfast political prisoners, including Mojahedin prisoners.
Reports from Iran indicate that several Mojahedin political prisoners, including Hojjat Zamani, have disappeared in the past few weeks and there is no credible information about their whereabouts.
A number of Mojahedin prisoners have also been transferred to Tehran from provincial prisons to coerce them by torture into repenting on television and lashing out at the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI).
The regime’s henchmen in Gohardasht prison in the city of Karaj (west of Tehran), including the prison warden, Haj Kazem, have boasted to prisoners about the suspicious transfers of the past few days, saying that Hojjat Zamani has been hanged and threatening to hang other prisoners as well.
As of February 12, the Zamani family’s enquiries from prison authorities have been to no avail. They have been told to go to the Tehran’s Prosecutor’s Office. The regime’s agents had on Sunday, February 5, pressured Mr. Zamani to plead for clemency but he has reportedly refused.
A member of the PMOI, Zamani, 31, was imprisoned in 2001. The regime has in the past five years pressured and tortured Mr. Zamani in order to break his morale. On several occasions, it moved him into the ward housing criminals. Mr. Zamani went on hunger strike several times in 2004 and 2005 and asked for a review of conditions in the regime’s notorious prisons and investigation into the extensive violation of human rights in Iran.
The Iranian Resistance calls on the United Nations Security Council, the UN Secretary General, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, and all international human rights organizations to enquire about the circumstances of Mr. Zamani’s imprisonment and his fate after five years of incarceration.
It also urges all human rights advocates throughout the world to condemn the Iranian regime and to intervene to save the lives of political prisoners in Iran who are on death row.
The Security Council must review the clerical regime’s record of extensive and gross violations of human rights, including 120,000 political executions, as well as its terrorist crimes abroad. The leaders of the religious terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran must stand trial in an international tribunal for their crimes against the Iranian people.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
February 14, 2006
