Iran political activist in danger of imminent execution

Iran Focus: London, Mar. 29 – An Iranian opposition activist is in danger of imminent execution, Iran Focus has learnt.
Iran Focus

London, Mar. 29 – An Iranian opposition activist is in danger of imminent execution, Iran Focus has learnt.

Valiollah Feyz-Mahdavi, a 28-year-old member of Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), has been officially informed that his execution sentence will be carried out on May 16, according to his relatives in Iran.

Feyz-Mahdavi was notified of his impending execution on March 24.

He was arrested in 2001 for membership in the PMOI and has endured torture in Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, west of Tehran.

His execution would be the second such known political execution in the past two months. Another PMOI member, Hojjat Zamani, who had been a political prisoner in Iran since 2001, was hanged in Gohardasht Prison on February 7. Zamani, 31 at the time he was hanged, had undergone severe physical and psychological torture to break his morale and compel him to express remorse and surrender.

Feyz-Mahdavi and Zamani along with another Mojahedin political prisoner, Jaafar Aghdami, 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 political prisoners.

In February, the human rights group Amnesty International announced that it had “grave concern” about the “alarming rate” of executions in Iran, in particular highlighting the cases of a number of political prisoners, several of whom are on death row.

“Hojjat Zamani’s execution has fuelled fears that other political prisoners may be at risk of imminent execution”, Amnesty said.

The rights group said that there had been reports circulating since the start of February that “a number of political and other prisoners who are under sentence of death have been told by prison officials that they would be executed if Iran should be referred to the UN Security Council over the resumption of its nuclear programme”.

“These are said to have included other members of the PMOI”, it said, adding, “It was the PMOI that was the source of evidence in 2002 revealing Iran’s nuclear programme to the outside world”.

Among those feared to be at risk were Saeed Masouri, a PMOI member who has been held in solitary confinement in Section 209 of Evin Prison since late 2004; Khaled Hardani, Farhang Pour Mansouri, and Shahram Pour Mansouri; Gholamhossein Kalbi and Valiollah Feyz Mahdavi, both PMOI members; and Alireza Karami Khairabadi, Amnesty said.