International human rights organisations today warned that many prominent activists and politicians have been arrested in Iran in response to protests over the country’s disputed presidential election.
Hadi Ghaemi, director of the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights, said he had spoken with family members and colleagues of people who have been arrested or disappeared and was told that there were at least 200 across the country.
The Iranian government has said that it has arrested a relatively small number of people responsible for violence and other crimes.
Mr Ghaemi said one of the latest to be arrested was Ebrahim Yazdi, who was foreign minister after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution and is now leader of the banned but tolerated Freedom Movement of Iran. Mr Ghaemi said Mr Yazdi was arrested in the intensive care unit of Pars Hospital in Tehran.
Mr Yazdi’s son, Mehdi Noorbaksh, who lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, confirmed that his 74-year-old father was detained while undergoing treatment at the hospital. Mr Noorbaksh said he was arrested around 3pm yesterday and taken to Evin Prison, just outside the Iranian capital.
“It has been very difficult to get information, phone lines are cut off,” he said.
Iranian analyst Saeed Leilaz was arrested yesterday by plainclothes security officers at his home, said his wife, Sepehrnaz Panahi. Mr Ghaemi also said that Mohammad-Reza Jalaipour, another noted Iranian analyst, was detained.
The BBC’s Farsi-language news site said Mr Jalaipour is a student at Oxford and was arrested at the airport upon trying to leave Iran with his wife, Fatemeh Shams. A plainclothes officer did not give a reason for the arrest, Ms Shams told the BBC.
Amnesty International said that 17 political activists were detained and taken to “unspecified locations” on Monday night after they staged a peaceful protest in a square in Tabriz, north-western Iran.
Amnesty said Ghaffari Farzadi, a leading member of the Iran Freedom Movement and a lecturer at Tabriz University, was also arrested, according to witnesses they spoke to at the university. It
said a crackdown on about 3,000 protesters in the north-western city of Oroumiye led to the deaths of two people and the detention of hundreds.
In the southern city of Shiraz, tear gas was used in a university library where security forces beat students and detained about 100 people, the group said. And in the northern town of Babol, armed paramilitaries and plain-clothed officials surrounded Babol University and targeted students in dormitories, witnesses told Amnesty.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said other people who have
disappeared or been arrested include prominent reformer Saeed Hajjarian, an advisor to former president Mohammad Khatami, who was paralysed in an assassination attempt in 2000 and Mohammad Tavasoli, the director of the political office of the Freedom Movement of Iran. He was arrested June 16th.
It said human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani was arrested in his office by security forces posing as clients.
AP