United States Agency for Global Media

Radio Farda releases exclusive documents on prisoner mistreatment in Evin Prison

November 3, 2021

Washington — In an exclusive, Radio Farda has begun to release confidential documents and communications by officials at Iran’s notorious Evin prison about the systematic mistreatment of the political prisoners, including internal directives concerning some of Iran’s most notable prisoners of conscience. The self-described hacking group Edalat e Ali (Ali’s Justice), which in August released exclusive video showing inmate abuse at Evin that it obtained when it hacked the prison’s closed-circuit television system, provided the new set of documents to Radio Farda; RFE/RL cannot independently verify the authenticity of the documents leaked by Edalat-e Ali.

· The first document, marked “confidential,” is a letter from a security official who complains about the publication in foreign-based media of reports about the deteriorating health of famed political prisoner Mohammad Nourizad, who was on a hunger strike. In the letter addressed to the director-general of prisons in Tehran, the official accuses Nourizad of “spreading lies” and demands that he be more closely supervised.

· Another leaked document, a letter signed by Evin Prison’s warden at the time, Ali Chaharmahali, informs the head of the Department for Supervision of Defendants and Security Convicts about a ban on in-person meetings with family members imposed against well-known human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, due to Sotoudeh’s refusal to sign a “written commitment” to observe the hijab.

· A third document, a report by Evin Prison’s head of security and intelligence Gholamreza Mohammadi, called for prisoners to be punished for launching protest hunger strikes, publishing letters and statements, and publishing audio files. Mohammadi refers to the “successful benefit of canceling Nazanin Zaghari’s face-to-face visits” which, according to him, “eventually led to her breaking the hunger strike.” Zaghari-Ratcliffe is the Iranian-British political prisoner who is being used as a bargaining chip by the Islamic Republic. In the report, Mohammadi recommended that in case of similar incidents, the rights of prisoners, such as “face-to-face and private visits, etc.” should be limited.

Radio Farda will release more of these hacked documents in the coming days via its Instagram and Twitter feeds, as well as its website.

 

About RFE/RL