At least eight prisoners died in the penitentiary center where foreign opponents and citizens are held.
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mutiny? Provocation of the regime? Evin prison, an ultra-secure penitentiary complex, where many opponents are detained, found itself plunged into chaos on Saturday October 15. The images shared on social networks in the evening showed immense flames and thick smoke rising from the prison, located in the north of Tehran, while fed fire, coming from the interior of the enclosure, were heard. At least five explosions, following projectiles drawn by the police from the outside, rocked the surrounding district.
worried about the fate of their loved ones, many families braved the dams of the security forces to approach on the night of Saturday to Sunday from the penitentiary center with cries of “death to the dictator”. On Sunday, when calm had returned near Evin, the judicial authorities advanced a balance sheet of “four dead prisoners and sixty and one other injured due to the inhalation of smoke caused by a fire”. On Monday, they revised this highlight, bringing it to at least eight dead. Referring to “disorders and confrontations” in a section where ordinary law prisoners are detained, they have specified that the victims are part of the same category: a way of minimizing the importance of the drama and dissociating these events from the movement of Contestation that shakes the country.
severely beaten and transferred
According to power, “thugs” have burned a clothing warehouse in the prison sewing workshop. However, the former Evin political prisoners explain that access to this part of the complex is closed to detainees from evening prayer, so long before the events, which started between 8:30 p.m. and 21 hours, local time Tehran.
In this vast prison, described as “largest university in the country” or “Iranian Bastille”, renowned for the ill -treatment inflicted on prisoners, are locked up both detainees of opinion, intellectuals and foreign and binational citizens as Ordinary law prisoners. Among them, Mostafa Tajzadeh, a figure in the reformist camp. In an open letter addressed from his cell in the Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, made public on October 10, this former Deputy Minister of the Interior had denounced the lack of respect for the “legal rights of prisoners” which reigns in Evin.
Hundreds of people have been incarcerated there since the start of the demonstrations launched by the death, on September 16, of the young Mahsa Amini, following a control of the moral police. The repression resulted in the death of more than two hundred people, according to NGOs. According to the prisoners who called their relatives, some important detainees, including Irano-American Siamak Namazi, the former mayor of Tehran, Mohammad-Ali Najafi and Hossein Fereydoun, brother of the former president Hassan Rohani, Who are locked in section 4 of the prison, were transferred to another “safe” place at the start of the events.
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