CNN - October 2: Ebrahim Sharifi

Iranian claims rape in prison after protests of IranElection

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Also read the following article in The New York Times.

Ebrahim Sharifi on Radio Farda

Rape victim Ebrahim Sharifi did an interview with Radio Farda

Translation tweeted by @persianbanoo, September 21.

Ebrahim Sharifi, computer science & Italian language student talks to Radio Farda about his arrest.

ES: I was returning home from the Italian Consulate when I heard someone calling me. I went towards the person calling me, and all of a sudden they grabbed me, handcuffed and blindfolded me. They threw me into a car pushing my head down behind the seat.

RF: How come in judiciary panel report they indicate there is no history of your arrest?

ES: Just what do you expect them to say. From the very beginning, when Mr. Moghadami started to interrogate me ... I told Mr. Karoubi that this prosecutor is talking to me as though I have received money from you to become a witness or as if I have become a pawn in a political game.

RF: After your arrest where was the first place they took you, and did they explain your charges?

ES: I was not interrogated the entire time. They only asked for my name when they released me.

RF: Where did they take you to?

ES: A place where I could not hear cars anymore. They took me out of the car and pushed me. All I could hear was the sound of my breath and others breathing. I was laying on my stomach. I don't know if I fell asleep or not. Early in the morning I could hear a woman's voice screaming: "Don't, don't, don't hit, don't hit!"

RF: Which detention center were you at?

ES: I don't know, I was handcuffed & blindfolded.

RF: How long were you at this detention center.

ES: From June 23 to June 30.

RF: When exactly were you raped?

ES: The fourth day they took me for a mock execution session. I told them, if you are going to execute me, then do it, what kind of games are you playing. Someone hit me in my stomach, I fell to the ground, he continued to hit me in my stomach. He told someone else "take him & make him pregnant". I was vomiting blood. They pulled me by my arm, took me to a room & tied me to the wall.

RF: You had said you didn't know if that same person raped you or someone else did.

ES: I think it was the same person. But I am not certain it was him or a foreign object was used. Even judge Mohamadi asked me if I resisted or protested in any way. I answered him I wasn't capable of thinking at that time.

RF: What were your feelings at that time?

ES: I was vomiting blood and also due to what had just happened I passed out. The man told me, "you can't even protect your-----how are you going to make velvet revolution?"

RF: When you became conscious, where did you find yourself?

ES: I was in a medical clinic, laying in a bed, IV in one arm and the other arm cuffed to the bed. Someone came in and asked a doctor if I was going to die or should they take care of me themselves. Blindfolded and handcuffed they threw me into a car drove me to Sabalan highway where they threw me out on the side of the road, told me to count to 60 nd then they left.

RF: What was the first thing you did after you arrived home?

ES: None of my family members knew of my rape until Mr. Alameh's video. Only Mr. Karoubi, a few Parliament members and Justice Dept officials and some of the clergy knew of the rape. The next day, a friend who is a lawyer advised me to make an official complaint. I went to the public prosecutor's office in Elahiyeh, filled in an official complaint. After being harassed there, I was able to obtain a letter from a judge. The judge told me to go to Niyavaran PD, he also said this could be the work of Monafeghin (MKO).

RF: Did you bring up the matter of your rape with the judge?

ES: No I did not.

RF: Then when did you decide to bring up the matter of your rape?

ES: I didn't want to talk about the rape. At the police station they told me it's best not to follow this case. They said this sounds like the Ministry's work, and I should thank God that I am still alive. I still had pain in my stomach and back, I was able to get a report from the medical examiner’s office. A friend suggested I should go to a clergy or to Mr. Karoubi. I went to Mr. Karoubi. At first I didn't want to say anything about being raped. Mr. Karoubi seeing my tears and the tone of my voice, asked if I was hiding anything. He asked everyone to leave the room, quoted an Ayeh from the Quran and asked if anything like that had happened to me. I said yes. I started to cry, he hugged me and was extremely upset. After a month and a half Mr. Moghadami interrogated me and took me to the medical examiner’s office. They told me that too long had gone by and that they could not make a ruling. The police had told me that the medical examiner's office would be able to even pin point the size of the object used.

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@persianbanoo:

So sad to think how many more rape victims there are that are not coming forward due to the stigma attached to rape in Iran. It is even harder for a female rape victim to come forward.

Rape victim Ebrahim Sharifi now lives outside Iran. His family and friends are being pressured to give TV interview and deny all of his rape charges. HRA is very concerned about his family’s safety.

IR HRA spokesman says, what happened to Sharifi was not a one time accident but seems to be a systematic torture method not limited to only one prisons in Tehran but is used in other cities in Iran as well.

The rape victims both male & female who are set free after the rape, are usually young and from religious families.

Arrested, beaten and raped

- an Iran protester's tale

This account of rape and torture was published in Guardian.co.uk as early as July 1, 2009 as a part of Guardian’s project to trace people who were killed and detained during the unrest. When the story was published, Guardian had not been able to verify it through independent sources.

Afshin, a shopkeeper from south-west Iran, tells the story to Esfandiar Poorgiv (a pseudonym) a journalist and academic:

“He came to my shop around 10.30am. You could tell straight away that he had just been released. His face was bruised all over. His teeth were broken and he could hardly open his eyes.

[…] He had gone home directly after his release, but his father did not let him in. He didn't mention he had been raped. At first, he didn't tell me either. It was the doctor who first noticed it and told me.

When he came to my shop he collapsed in a chair. He said he had nowhere to go and asked if he could stay with me. I called a friend of mine who is a doctor to come home and see him. Then I brought him home.

His shoulder blades and arms were wounded. There were some slashes on the face. No bone fractures, but he was bruised all over the body. I wanted to take some photos but he did not let me. The doctor said only four of his teeth were intact, the rest were broken. You could hardly understand what he said.

Then the doctor told me what had happened. He had suffered rupture of the rectum and the doctor feared colonic bleeding. He suggested we take him to the hospital immediately.

They registered him under a false name and with somebody else's insurance. The nurses were crying. Two of them asked what sort of beast had beaten him up like that. He was a broken man. He told us not to waste our money on him, and that he would kill himself.

He was arrested in Shiraz on 15 June, the Monday after the election. Some sturdy young men made a human shield around the demonstrators. He was among them. He said he managed to hit some of the anti-riot police. But then they caught him and beat him up.

"I was kept in a van till evening that day and then transferred to a solitary cell where I was kept for two days," he said. "Then I was repeatedly interrogated, beaten and hung from a ceiling. They call it chicken kebab. They tie your hands and feet together and hang you from the ceiling, turning you around and beating you with cables.

"They gave us warm water to drink and one meal a day. Repeated smacking was a regular punishment. In interrogations, they kept on asking if I was instructed from abroad. I believed I was going to be sent from the detention centre to prison. But they sent me to where they called Roughnecks' Room. There were some other youths of my age in there. I asked a guard why I am not sent to prison and the reply was: 'You have to be our guest for a while.'

"I refused to confess during interrogations. They said: 'Ask your friends what we'll do to you if you don't co-operate.' Others in the room were also arrested on 15 June. I was tempted to confess at this point but I didn't. On the third and fourth day, they beat me up again. They insisted we were instructed from abroad. I kept on saying we were only protesting for our votes.

"It was on Saturday or Sunday that they raped me for the first time. There were three or four huge guys we had not seen before. They came to me and tore my clothes. I tried to resist but two of them laid me on the floor and the third did it. It was done in front of four other detainees.

"My cell mates, especially the older one, tried to console me. They said nobody loses his dignity through such an act. They did it to two other cell mates in the next days. Then it became a routine. We were so weak and beaten up that could not do anything.

"Then the interrogations started again. They said: 'If you don't come to your senses we will send you to Adel Abad [another prison in Shiraz] to the pederasts' section so that you receive such treatment every day.' I was so weak I did not know what to say. Then they asked for my contacts. I told them I had no contacts and I was informed about the demonstrations through the internet.

"The same routine was continued till this morning when I was released. In the last week, there was no interrogation, no beating. Only rape and solitary confinement."

This is what he recounted. But he couldn't articulate quite like this. He was in much physical and mental pain as he talked. I asked him to tell his story in the hope of making a difference to those still detained.”

Source

Ebrahim Sharifi on VoA

- telling his story of rape in prison

Link via @omidhabibinia

Unfortunately this video has no English subtitles.

Repeatedly raped in Iran prison

Maryam Sabri comes forward to tell VoA about her two weeks in jail where she was repeatedly raped. She was arrested because she was attending a memorail service for those killed in the post election protests.

Raped in prison

- pressured to stay silent

From Radio Free Europe

Radio Liberty Watchdog, September 14

“A well-known Iranian filmmaker, Reza Allamezadeh, has posted on his website a video of a young Iranian man, Ebrahim Sharifi, who says he was raped in prison in Iran after being arrested in the postelection crackdown. [See yesterday’s blog entry]

Sharifi says he was harassed and threatened by officials for talking about his experience and informing reformist cleric Mehdi Karrubi about what he went through in detention.

Karrubi, who has said that postelection detainees have been "savagely" raped in prison, said earlier this month that one of his rape witnesses had disappeared. Sharifi says he's Karrubi's witness and he decided to go into hiding following threats against his family.

The young man says he was told by a security officer, who first claimed to be a friend of his father, that if he talked about his experience with a special parliamentary commission investigating the postelection violence, he and his family would be killed in a fake accident. Sharifi says the man told him, "You know we will do it." Sharifi says that because of this threat he went into hiding and has been in hiding since.

He sent the video to Allamezadeh and asked him to make it public. Allamezadeh had recently posted testimony by two women who were raped in Iranian prisons in the 1980s. Sharifi says he decided to send a letter about his plight in prison to Allamezadeh so that someone outside Iran would know about it in case something happened to him and Karrubi.

[…] Sharifi says he was interrogated for 11 hours and pressured to confess that he had received money from Karrubi to make the rape allegations.

He says he thought many times about committing suicide, but he adds that he also thinks about his rights and the violations of the rights of people such as him. […]”

Read full story here.

Reza Allamezadeh’s interviews with other rape victims:

Witness 1

Witness 2

Karroubi’s witness speaks out

Twitter September 13-14:

• @IranRiggedElect: Reza Allamehzadeh claims video & conversation with Karroubi's witness (rape victim).
• @sbelg: Ebrahim Sharifi, Karoubi's witness, records a video on his cell phone & sends it out to tell his story.
• @iran88: Karoubi's eyewitness: My families was threatened to death, I'm hiding (FA) http://bit.ly/EVXpn

I’ll publish English translation if it becomes available.

Karoubi's Letter to the Head of Iran's Judiciary

- written after his office was attacked and sealed

From Revolutionary Road (Facebook page) - posted September 12:

Karroubi on his meetings with the judiciary committee:

“[I also said] know this, that if in my investigations I conclude that any of these allegations are false, I will step forward and right this wrong. In this regard, my further investigations had proven the falsity of some of the previous statements I had made about Saeedeh Pouraghayi, which I corrected.

[…] our meeting with the committee came to a good end.”

[The day after Karroubi’s meeting with the committee, his office was attacked and searched, and office documents, personal letters and writings, bills and private papers and even charity money were confiscated. Also the office Etermad Melli, Karroubi’s political party, was shut down and sealed and documents confiscated.]

Karroubi continues:

“I am left wondering: did these events occur on Tuesday as a result of my meeting on Monday? I am left baffled not by what they have done to Karoubi, but that they think that Karoubi, the son of Ahmad, is going to leave the field and choose to remain silent? Now I know why some friends and advisers insisted that I give all the evidence for rape and torture as it had been retold to me by the victims, on a CD and to keep a copy in a safe place. Because the machine of terror is still at work and who knows, some of the witnesses may now take back their claims out of fear.

[…] after such terror, fear and threats, is it even possible to attend to the terror and atrocity that occurred after the election? You are left to answer this question but know that Mehdi Karoubi still insists on reclaiming the rights of the oppressed. Such old, overused tactics may work to silence some, but they will not work on Mehdi Karoubi”

[Karroubi’s letter is dated September 10, 2009]

Full story

"You deserve what’s coming to you!"

Iranian boy who defied Tehran hardliners tells of prison rape ordeal

timesonline.co.uk

The 15-year-old boy sits weeping in a safehouse in central Iran, broken in body and spirit. Reza will not go outside — he is terrified of being left alone. He says he wants to end his life and it is not hard to understand why: for daring to wear the green wristband of Iran’s opposition he was locked up for 20 days, beaten, raped repeatedly and subjected to the Abu Ghraib-style sexual humiliations and abuse for which the Iranian regime denounced the United States

[…]

“They were telling us they were doing this for God, and who did we think we were that we could demonstrate,” Reza said. The men told the other boys they would receive the same treatment if they did not co-operate when interrogated the next day.

[…]

The interrogator ordered Reza to be tied up and raped him again, saying: “This time I’ll do it, so you’ll learn not to tell these tales anywhere else. You deserve what’s coming to you. You guys should be raped until you die.”

Read whole story

Marina Nemat: Rape in Evin Prison

VOA interview with Marina Nemat, author of the book "Prisoner in Tehran", who was arrested 15 years old accused of being "anti-revolutionary". In prison she was forced to "marry" her interrogator. She was freed after three years and is now living in Toronto.

She says: "These things have been happening for 30 years, but the people responsible preferred to stay silent."

Part 1:

Part 2:

I’m too tired now

Reza Alamehzadeh interviews 2nd. victim of rape in prisons of Islamic regime of Iran. Farsi with English subtitle.

A Woman's account of rape in prison

Reza Alamehzadeh interviews first victim of rape in prisons of Islamic regime of Iran. Farsi with English subtitle.

Part 1



Part 2