We Shall Continue Until We Die

Four Sunni prisoners in Karaj’s Ghezelhesar prison have been on a hunger strike for the past two months and their health is now reported to be in very serious condition. Reporter Kamal Hosseini, reports from Iranian Kurdistan that, “The physical condition of these prisoners is bad and they had been taken to the prison clinic several times because of it.” A source close to these prisoners has also quoted the strikers to have determinedly said that they “would not break their hunger strike until their requests are met even if they die.”

The four Sunni prisoners Hamed Ahmadi, Kamal Molai, Jamshid and Jahangir Dehghan, along with two other prisoners Hadi Hosseini and Sedigh Mohammadi, entered their wet strike (in  which a person takes water but not food) more than a month ago after their calls for an open trial and transfer to a provincial prison were disregarded.

According to Kamal Hosseini, the reporter for Mokrian news agency, the health of three of the hunger strikers has deteriorated so much that they had passed out and had to be taken to physicians outside the prison.

Hosseini writes that judge Mogheise tried the cases of these prisoners in branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court which took a mere ten minutes. He added that the prisoners had been forced to sign fake confessions under duress during their interrogations. The defendants wore handcuffs and blinders on their transfer from their detention center to the courthouse. Prior to being transferred to Ghezelhesar prison in the town of Karaj outside Tehran, the prisoners were held in various other prisons, including those in the Kurdish town of Sanandaj and Rajaishahr in Karaj. According to Hosseini, these prisoners had gone on a hunger strike at least on two separate occasions in the past as a way to protest their conditions.

These six prisoners, along with yet another six prisoners by the names of Bahram Ahmadi, Keivan Zand Karimi, Hooshyar Mohammad, Mohammad-Zaher Bahmani, and, Asghar and Behnam Rahimi have been sentenced to death by branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court on the charge of “murdering clerics in Kurdistan” province. The judge in their trial too was Mogheise.

The reference to murders of clerics in Kurdistan in the judge’s verdict is to the series of assassinations and murders in Kurdistan province, particularly in those that have been reported in the year 2009.

Six of the accused were arrested in 2011 and were hanged in Ghezelhesar prison in 2012. All of these prisoners, according to the sources, were born between the years 1981 and 1992 in the Kurdish town of Sanandaj and were executed on drug-related charges. Their bodies have till now not been given to their families.