Iran has executed opposition activist – report

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Feb. 13 – Iranian authorities are believed to have executed a long-time political prisoner, Iran Focus has learnt.
Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Feb. 13 – Iranian authorities are believed to have executed a long-time political prisoner, Iran Focus has learnt.

Hojjat Zamani, 30 years old, had been imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison since the year 2000 for being a member of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI).

A source who wished to remain anonymous informed Iran Focus that Zamani had been executed over the past few days after Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentence against him.

Zamani reportedly endured severe torture in Evin Prison, later escaping and fleeing to Turkey. He was arrested however and turned over to agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Zamani was sent back to Iran where Amnesty International reported he was once again subjected to torture.

Reports had surfaced that in 2005, Zamani was held in the “dangerous prisoners” section of Rajai-Shahr Prison in Karaj (west of Tehran). In the winter of 2004, he and a group of other political prisoners went on a hunger strike that lasted several weeks.

He was reportedly threatened with imminent execution, as part of the pressure exerted to force him to end his hunger strike.

Zamani along with two other Mojahedin political prisoners, Jaafar Aghdami and Valiollah Feiz-Mahdavi, wrote a letter to the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on January 24, 2005, calling on him to set up a special fact-finding mission to “investigate the plight of families of political prisoners, particularly those whose loved ones were tortured or executed in mullahs’ prisons in the 1980s”.

A prison official only identified as Sheikhan reportedly threatened Zamani by saying that he would face imminent execution unless he recanted his letter and collaborated with the regime, after the smuggled letter was distributed to human rights activists outside Iran.

On Saturday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition coalition which includes the Mojahedin, issued a statement saying that Zamani had disappeared.

Zamani’s two brothers, Fallah and Khazal, were executed by the Iranian regime in earlier dates.