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WASHINGTON – The wife of an Iranian journalist detained from the nation’s Derviche Gonabadi religious minority says she is distressed by authorities’ persistent refusal to temporarily release her husband from a prison plagued by coronavirus.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday with Tehran’s Persian VOA, Faezeh Abdipour said she had made repeated requests to Iranian officials to include her husband, Mohammad Sharifi Moghadam, on permits granted to tens of thousands of prisoners since the end of February.
Iran’s judiciary approved prisoner permits in part to curb the spread of the virus in its crowded and unhealthy jails, where human rights activists first reported outbreaks in early March. But authorities said temporary releases would not be granted to dissidents with more than five years in prison for participating in activities designated as security offenses.
“We have been following (Sharifi Moghadam’s) request for temporary release, we have made numerous communications and even referred his case to an implementation office and spoke to an official in charge of the jails, but all of our efforts failed,” Abdipour said. .
Sharifi Moghadam has served a 12-year sentence, confirmed by an appeals court in March 2019, at the Greater Tehran Penitentiary, accused of “spreading anti-government propaganda”. A lower court imposed the sentence in August 2018 after authorities detained him earlier that year while covering street protests by other Gonabadi dervishes in Tehran.
Abdipour said she suspects the Iranian authorities denied her husband’s license applications because her sentence exceeds five years. “Apparently, the authorities think that prisoners with terms of more than five years never get sick, so they do not need to let these prisoners be released temporarily,” he said.
When such prisoners become ill, as Abdipour previously said her husband did in 2018, the health system at the Tehran Grand Penitentiary is so poor that inmates cannot obtain effective treatment there, as she put it.
“The spread of this disease within the prison, the infections of the prisoners and the death of some of them are very distressing,” said Abdipour. “Health security is our main concern, and at any moment we hope to hear that our loved ones have become infected (with coronaviruses),” she added, referring to herself and other family members of detainees in prison.
Iran has not provided any data on coronavirus infections in its prisons.
Sharifi Moghadam was assigned to the Majzooban-e-Noor news site, which focuses on the Iranian Gonabadi Dervish community, when he was arrested by security forces on February 19, 2018, when they cracked down on the Dervish protests that erupted in Tehran that day.
The protests of February 19 and 20, 2018 turned into violent clashes with the security forces, which arrested more than 300 people. Five members of the Iranian security staff were also killed.
In August 2018, a Turkey-based publisher of Majzooban-e-Noor told VOA Persian that the Iranian authorities had sentenced six of the media’s journalists to prison terms of a total of 71 years after detaining them. in connection with the protests. The news site said some of the journalists had also been beaten by plainclothes security officers while being arrested.
Dervish protesters had been demanding the release of arrested members of their community and the removal of security checkpoints around the home of their elderly leader, Noor Ali Tabandeh. He later died in December 2019.
Members of the Sufi Muslim religious sect have long complained of harassment by Iran’s Shiite Islamist rulers, who view them as heretics.
Media rights group Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières, RSF) says Iran has been one of the world’s most repressive countries for journalists for the past 40 years. Iran was ranked 173 out of 180 nations on the RSF 2020 World Press Freedom Index.
This article originated from the Persian VOA Service.
