Iranian prison guards broke the kneecaps of a 70-year-old human rights activist and grandmother who is serving a 10-year sentence for anti-government views, a report said Monday.
Mahvash Sabet Shahriari was brutally assaulted by an interrogator during questioning at a notorious Tehran prison dubbed the “world’s worst,” according to the Sun.
Shahriari was arrested last summer as part of the Iranian regime’s oppressive crackdown on the Baháʼí community, a religious minority, the outlet said, citing local media sources.
It was unclear from the article when the beating reportedly occurred.
In January, Shahriari’s son Frud Sabet told Radio Farda he had not gotten word about his mother’s condition since she had her sham trial in November.
“The family is very worried about her health,” he said. “We don’t know where she is, and we don’t know if she’s alive.”
Even though Shahriari’s July arrest came before the widespread protests against the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in September, Sabet believed she was receiving worse treatment amid the national reckoning with the brutal regime.
“We assume that the overcrowding of prisons and courts has affected my mother’s fate,” he reportedly said.
Hardline leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have called members of the unity-based Baháʼí faith “spies and enemies,” and they have been deprived of basic human rights, rounded up and arrested in raids ordered by President Ebrahim Raisi, who was “elected” in 2021.
The intense persecution of Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority has included over 200 executions and murders at the hands of the Islamic State over the past four decades, religious officials say.
“The despicable onslaught against the Baháʼí religious minority is yet another manifestation of the Iranian authorities’ decades-long persecution of this peaceful community,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, following the arrests.
Source » nypost