18 April 2021 :
Cellmate Describes Torture and Humiliation of Top Student in Evin Prison
A year has passed since Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi, two top students at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, were arrested on terrorism charges. Now, another detainee who was Younesi’s cellmate in Evin Prison for nine days in the summer of 2020 at Evin Prison has come forward to describe the ruthless psychological and physical torture this student was subjected to in order to extract a forced confession from him. Mojtaba Hosseini is an Iranian citizen who was arrested in the summer of 2020 by the Intelligence Ministry for posting satirical tweets. He was sent to Ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison, and after a few days in solitary confinement was transferred to the ward’s quarantine section, where he met Ali Younesi. The two young men had been arrested that April. Shortly afterwards Gholamhossein Esmaili, spokesman for the Iranian judiciary, accused them of working with opposition group the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK), which is designated as a terrorist organization by the Islamic Republic, and claimed that explosives had been discovered in their homes. These charges were denied by their families and people close to them. Aida Younesi, Ali’s sister, compared the case against her brother to that of the Iranians who were wrongly accused of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, in a case that was eventually dropped but not before they had all faced 26 months of detention and been tortured into giving false confessions. In an interview with IranWire, Mojtaba Hosseini told us all he could recall about the treatment of Ali Younesi during his detention.
The long interview is on the Iranwire website.
