Since she was first jailed in 2018 for covering labor strikes at a local sugar factory, journalist and activist Sepideh Gholian has become somewhat of an expert at exposing the torture tactics she has witnessed in prisons throughout Iran.
Now the 26-year-old’s experiences, drawn from her incarceration at detention facilities and four notorious penitentiaries around the country, has landed her back in a familiar place — prison.
Gholian was on medical furlough after contracting COVID-19 when a large team of security agents stormed her family’s home in the western Khuzestan Province on October 10, arrested her, and took her into detention.
Gholian’s lawyer, Amir Raisian, wrote on Twitter on October 13 that his client called her family after two days and said she had been taken from the provincial capital, Ahvaz, to the port town of Bushehr, and from there to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
Gholian’s lawyer said his client was transferred to the Tehran facility for “investigation and interrogation.”
As she has been transferred from prison to prison over the years Gholian has specifically requested that she not be sent back to Evin prison where, she told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda in an interview last month, she had been “threatened with death and rape many times.”
Her arrest came just days after Gholian posted an image of a summons for her to face charges of “spreading lies and propaganda” online against the Iranian government.
While the Iranian authorities have not officially made the connection, Gholian’s arrest and transfer to Evin prison appears to be related to a series of tweets she posted on September 9 in which she documented what she said was rampant prisoner abuse during her time at Bushehr Central Prison.
Those tweets included accounts of psychological torture, collective punishment, and sex-for-favors practices.
In posting the summons she received from the local prosecutor’s office, Gholian wrote on September 22 that “the Islamic Republic has once again proved that its answer to truth and justice is repression and revenge.”
Source: RFERL
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