Iran Focus
Tehran, 31 May – Twenty-nine young people were arrested last weekend at a party in north-eastern Iran.
The youngsters were rounded up at a villa near Danesh Junction in Mashhad on the evening of Saturday, 28 May.
On Monday, 30 May, the state-run Rokna news agency reported that 15 men and 14 women were taken to face prosecution in a court in District 6 of Mashhad on Sunday.
This news comes just a week after 35 young adults were flogged for attending a mixed-gender graduation party in Qazvin.
Notoriously cruel mullah, Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, announced via the regime-affiliated Mizan news agency, that a special court session had to be held after this event.
Niaraki said: “After we received information that a large number of men and women were mingling in a villa in the suburbs of Qazvin … all the participants at the party were arrested”.
He said that all detainees received 99 lashes from the purported ‘Morality Police’.
Shahin Gobadi of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said brutal acts like these prove that Hassan Rouhani’s Presidency is anything but moderate.
He said: “Three years after Rouhani’s Presidency the human rights situation in Iran is deteriorating in every aspect. This also shows the regime’s fragile state and total isolation among the Iranian people, in particular among the youths. The notion advocated by some in the West that this regime has a future is totally naïve”.
There were two more mixed-gender parties held in north-eastern Iranthat were broken up by the regime’s paramilitary Basij within three days of each other. They detained 70 people from the parties.