Reza Makeian AKA Reza Malek is a former deputy of Research and Investigation in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). He spent years in prison and in solitary confinement for disclosing the ministry’s 30 year involvement in the chain murder of dozens of Iranian intellectuals. He was arrested on July 3, 2001 and was sentenced to 4 years in prison. However, his sentence was increased to an additional 6 years, for secretly releasing a tape where he addressed UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, on Iran’s secret mass graves of prisoners during 1988 and other crimes the regime was involved in. He was released on April 15, 2012 after enduring 11 years in prison and solitary confinement. However, he had to sustain 70 lashes right before his release for “Spreading Lies and Disturbing the Public Opinion”. While enduring his 70 lashes, he uttered “Death to Khamenei”, a crime that landed him back in prison for an additional 2 years. He was finally released in April 2014 after spending 13 years in prison and is suffering from paralysis of his right leg. His torturer one day told him, “I am going to have your wife get divorced and then I will marry her”, and this has since come to pass.
(Below is a translation of Reza Malik’s letter by Iran Briefing, published in Gooya News)
Qizil Hisar Prison, 2008:
In the name of God
To: His Excellency Ban Ki Moon Secretary-General, UN
Her Excellency Navi Pillai
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Subject: Detection of a giant microbiological-chemical weapons research complex and an underground prison disguised as a zoological park in Karaj, Iran.
In addition to a variety of open and secret prisons and detention centers, the tyrants of Iran have created a most dreaded underground prison within a giant biological weapons research complex in the city of Karaj near Tehran for testing lethal material on the bodies of prisoners!
According to the latest information, the blackguard regime is maintaining a vast and inhuman prison establishment in the southwest of Karaj. This underground complex is one of the many research centers dedicated to the development of microbial and chemical warheads for Iranian missiles. During the last two decades, the regime has been engaged in developing long-range and intercontinental missiles with technology transferred by North Korea, Russia and China.
It is a complex where prisoners are being used as test animals for carrying out the most heinous and reprehensible trials on living beings.
This killer site is maintained and run by the Protection Division of the General Command of the Armed Forces. Specifically, each unit of this complex is controlled and maintained by a separate concerned division of the related bodies under the supervision and control of the General Command of the Armed Forces.
This complex is divided into three separate and self-contained parts that are unrelated to each other. The area occupied by this complex is spread over more than two thousand hectares.
This area extends from Mehr Shahr and Kakh-e-Shams in the north to the trisection of the Malard Road and Buvain Zahra Road in the south. It is coterminous with the Payam Airport in the west. Nobody knows how many organizations, with their ramifications, are operational underneath this forest area placed under the control and protection of the soldiers of the Yazidi regime! According to my information, this complex has at least three covered access passages in addition to a number of other secret passages. One access point is from the abandoned edible oil refining factory in the direction of the Payam Airport. The other is from the arrival square of the trisection of Buvain Zahra-Malard Roads in the direction of the Mehr Shahr. The third access is from a place which is apparently a police club.
In the underground, there is a personnel section—management and public facilities—which is equipped with all paraphernalia of modern living, such as apartments, enclaves, and several hostels, to separately accommodate the interrogators and the staff and workers of different sections. The arrangements are such that the functionaries are at home and are to stay and work underground for months at a time without the need to go out. All the access passages are connected with the research centers, the prison and the residential units, by well-built tunnels. The whole complex is ventilated by more than 50 pairs of jet fans.
Your Excellencies!
One of the important parts of this complex is a multi-phase prison which is named as the prison of the zoological park. The first part of this prison is divided into two sections. One section is reserved for the foreign prisoners and the other for the Iranian prisoners. The inmates of this black hole belong to the category of non-repatriable foreign and internal prisoners. In other words, they are persons who were abducted from different places and brought here. They are the persons who are declared as missing persons, whose destiny is sealed here. For instance, persons missing from the university hostels complex, persons missing during the disturbances of 2009, and other unfortunate political activists and dissidents who were abducted from the neighbouring and non-neighbouring countries, members of groups such as Al-Qaeda, Ra’d, PKK, Pazhak, and the Arabs, Europeans, Americans, Turks, Afghans and captives of many other nationalities who were abducted from abroad and being non-Iranian and declared as non-repatriable, are lodged in the foreigners’ section of this prison and are subjected to the harshest forms of interrogation. Fuladvand, of the Anjuman-i-Padshahi, and hundreds and thousands of other helpless persons, are lodged in this prison. Hizbullahi interrogators of different nationalities, acting under the direction of senior interrogators of the Yazidi army, are engaged in continuous interrogation of these prisoners. This vast prison has hundreds of cells with their different stages. Foreign nationals, who are abducted outside the country and from centers which the regime’s intelligence networks maintain in other countries, particularly the neighbouring countries, are smuggled out in the guise of “consignments” and with other pretenses and transferred to Iran in flagrant misuse of diplomatic immunity. “Ayat-us-Shaitan” Ali . . . of the Iranian judiciary has also been seen visiting this prison!
Your Excellencies!
In the other part of the prison, there exists a big cold store for keeping dead human bodies. Beside it, there exists a crematorium for the burning of human bodies. Some other halls of this eerie complex have been reserved as a zoo where many types of animal species are kept. As a matter of fact, monkeys imported into this zoo are merely a cover for carrying out underground and secret biological tests upon human beings. By virtue of this actual zoo, the whole complex has been given the name of a zoo by the informed functionaries of the regime.
Two other units of this black hole are related to the microbial and chemical labs of the complex. These two units are completely separate from each other in so far as their personnel, buildings or the captives under custody are concerned. The length and breadth of these two units are physically separated by a covered passage of a few hundred meters in length.
Your Excellencies!
These laboratories employ a large number of scientists and technicians who do not come out for weeks and months.
Your Excellencies!
In these laboratories, many types of lethal material and toxins are tested on human bodies. These humans, with their black and blue and worn out bodies, undergo such testing and trials.
The last part of this prison consists of death cells for individual prisoners. As soon as the interrogators of Hizbullah and of other nationalities, along with the agents of the obscurantist regime, have extracted the required information from a prisoner in the main ward, he is transferred to the functionaries of the laboratory section who keep their own cells and operation rooms.
Your Excellencies!
To conclude, may I remind you that the authoritarian regime ruling over the Iranian nation is creating a new problem, making a fresh arrest and finding a new enemy every day for the Iranian nation. The story of terroristic activities abroad, and later of the nuclear program, has not come to an end when it comes to light that the regime is absolutely determined to produce warheads of mass destruction in secret centers.
Your Excellencies!
Of course, the Europeans’ concern about Iran’s access to weapons of mass destruction, and allocation of huge military budgets toward this end, is not without reason!
For me it is quite clear, like the bright sun, that in the not too distant future, in addition to the Europeans, the Americans will also come within the range of Iranian microbial, chemical and nuclear warheads.
Your Excellencies!
Let the heads of government in Europe, like the Russians and Chinese, be the spectators of Iran’s getting access to destructive technologies of all types. Then ultimately, they will realize that small short term interests of Western companies have led to bigger losses for the European nations!
With esteemed regards for all defenders of human rights from Navi Pillai to Shirin Ibadi.