IRAN. POLITICAL PRISONER FACING IMMINENT EXECUTION

April 9, 2005: Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentence against Hojjat Zamani, a longtime political prisoner in Iran, making his execution imminent.
Zamani, 29 years old, had been imprisoned in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran since the year 2000 for being a member of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI). Zamani reportedly endured severe torture in Evin Prison, later escaping and fleeing to Turkey. He was arrested however and turned over to agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Zamani was sent back to Iran where Amnesty International reported he was once again subjected to torture. Reports had surfaced that in the past few months, Zamani was held in the “dangerous prisoners” section of Rajai-Shahr Prison in Karaj (west of Tehran).
Zamani along with two other Mojahedin political prisoners, Jaafar Aghdami and Valiollah Feiz-Mahdavi, wrote a letter to the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on January 24, calling on him to set up a special fact-finding mission to “investigate the plight of families of political prisoners, particularly those whose loved ones were tortured or executed in mullahs’ prisons in the 1980s”. A prison official only identified as Sheikhan reportedly threatened Zamani by saying that he would face imminent execution unless he recanted his letter and collaborated with the regime, after the smuggled letter was distributed to human rights activists outside Iran. Zamani’s two brothers, Fallah and Khazal, were executed by the Iranian regime at an earlier date. (Sources: Iran Iran, 09/04/2005)