LONDON: In a letter written inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, Sepideh Qolian, a prominent female Iranian activist, revealed how prisoners are tortured to extract confessions, the BBC reported.
Qolian was arrested in 2018 and convicted of acting “against national security” for her support of a strike and protest by workers at a sugar factory in Iran’s Khuzestan province. She is serving a five-year sentence and studying law in prison.
In her letter, seen by the BBC, Qolian describes the brutal interrogations that she and other detainees endured. Coerced confessions obtained in this way are subsequently broadcast on state television.
Qolian wrote that prison’s “cultural” wing, where she sits her law exams, is also used as a “torture and interrogation” facility.
“The exams room is filled with young boys and girls, and the shouts of torturers can be heard,” she writes in her letter.
Qolian also revealed details of her own interrogation and forced confession in 2018. She wrote that a female interrogator blindfolded her and demanded that she describe, on camera, alleged sexual relationships she had. She refused to do so.
After hours of questioning, Qolian said she begged to be taken to a restroom. The female interrogator took her to the women’s toilets, shoved her inside and locked the door. The toilet was inside an interrogation room, and could hear a man being tortured and whipped.
“The sounds of torture continued for hours, or maybe a day, maybe more. I lost track of time,” she wrote.
After she was let out of the toilet, and while sleep-deprived after three days of continuous interrogation, she said she was taken to a room where a video camera was set up and given a pre-written statement to read.
“I took the script from her as I was half-conscious and sat in front of the camera and read it,” Qolian wrote. Her conviction and sentence were based on that confession.
Qolian identified her interrogator as Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in November for her role in obtaining and broadcasting forced confessions of dual nationals and other prisoners.
Zabihpour sued Qolian over her allegations, as a result of which the activist received an additional eight-month prison sentence.
Qolian ends her letter by describing the ongoing anti-regime protests in Iran as a “revolution.”
She writes: “In the fourth year of my imprisonment I can finally hear the footsteps of liberation from all across Iran.
“Today the sounds we hear on the streets of Marivan, Izeh, Rasht, Sistan and Baluchistan, and across Iran, are louder than the sounds in interrogation rooms, this is the sound of a revolution, the true sound of woman, life, freedom.”
