News

Following the February 11th arrest of Ali Karroubi, 37, the objecting presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi’s son, and his subsequent torture inside the Amir-al-Momenin Mosque in Tehran by plainclothes Basijis, the subject of abuse and mistreatment of detainees has once again come to light. After the Iranian elections, when plainclothes and Basiji officers arrested many protesters and transferred them to Basij bases and mosques, beating and abusing them, government authorities refused to accept the responsibility for such actions. Mehdi Karroubi himself has repeatedly reported public complaints about rapes and sexual abuse, beatings and abuse of detainees, demanding high ranking government officials such as Head of the Judiciary and Speaker of the Parliament to review those complaints. Upon Mehdi Karroubi’s insistence, the three-person committee established by the Judiciary and an investigation commission inside the Iranian Parliament denied charges of abuse and dismissed the complaints.
Even so, a letter from Fatemeh Karroubi, Mehdi Karroubi’s wife, to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in which she describes what happened to her son leaves little room for any doubts about the systematic abuse and torture of detainees. In a part of her letter, Fatemeh Karroubi has even described physical torture and officers’ threats of rape. In the opening of her letter, she describes her record of service inside the Islamic Republic of Iran and her objectives in writing... >>>