Iran: Appeals court sentence 7 political activists to prison
Published by Ali on March 5, 2021
International Liberty Association: Tehran’s appeals court has sentenced Farangis Mazloom, Hood Yazarloo, Sediqeh Moradi, Mehdi Khavas Sefat and Mohammad Vali Gholamnezhad, five political activists to jail.
According to the verdict recently issued and imparted, Ms. Farangis Mazloom was sentenced to to 18 months in jail on the charges of “assembly and collusion with the intention to commit crime through communicating the PMOI/MEK” and “propaganda against the state in favor of dissident groups” .
Hood Yazarloo has been sentenced to a year in prison on the charge of “propaganda against the state in favor of dissident groups”.
On the same charge, Ms. Sedigheh Moradi and Mehdi Khavas Sefat have been sentenced to three months and Mohammad Vali Gholamnezhad to two months in Jail.
The Branch 29 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court headed by judge Seyyed Ali Mazloum in July 2020 had sentenced the activists to prison terms.
Dr. Hani Yazerlou and his son, Hood, Mohammad Vali Gholamnezhad, Sedigheh Moradi and Mehdi Khavas Sefat were arrested on 7 July 2019 by the intelligence agents in Tehran and were taken to the Ministry of Intelligence’s detention center, Ward 209 of Evin Prison. They were later released on bail pending trial.
Dr. Hani Yazerlou is a former political activist who has been arrested several times in the past decades.
Hood Yazerlou also endured time behind bars as a political prisoner back in the 2000s. He was arrested in June 2008 on the charge of “acting against national security”. He was released in 2011 from Rajaei Shahr Prison.
Ms. Farangis Mazloumi, the mother of political prisoner Soheil Arabi, was arrested by security forces on 22 July 2019, and was taken to Ward 209 of Evin Prison. She was arrested for defending her son and being the voice of this political prisoner.
She was finally released on bail on 7 October 2019, and was released on bail from Evin Prison pending trial.
Former political prisoner Sedigheh Moradi, 57, had been imprisoned twice before in the 1980s. She is a survivor of the massacre of political prisoners in 1988.
She was arrested in April 2011, and interrogated and tortured seven months in Ward 209 of the Evin Prison. Her torturers tried to force her into making false confessions against herself on the state television. Her eyes suffered damages and her vision deteriorated as a result of these tortures.
In July 2012, Sedigheh Moradi was transferred to the Qarchak Prison in Varamin and spent several months in inhuman conditions and among dangerous convicts. Soon after, prison authorities were alarmed by her positive impact on ordinary prisoners and isolated her from them.
She had been freed on 23 November 2016, upon the ruling of the Revision Court of Tehran.
ILA: Sedigheh Miradi’s husband, Mehdi Khavas Sefat is also a former political prisoner who spent from 1981 to 1988 in prison. He was repeatedly summoned and interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence when Mrs. Moradi was serving her sentence in Evin Prison between 2012 and 2017.
