Pejman Yousefzadeh

An utterly harrowing tale:

A young prisoner sat blindfolded, facing a wall in Tehran’s Evin prison. It was April 2010, nearly a year after the disputed presidential victory of Mahmud Ahmedinejad sparked massive street protests and thousands of arrests. The room was silent, but suddenly he heard a voice, closer than he would have expected. 

“What’s your name?”

“Hooman Musavi.”

The prisoner felt a powerful blow to the back of his head. The man standing over him opened a briefcase and took out a pile of papers. “Sign them,” he said. He struck the prisoner again, this time in the face.

“The session took 18 hours,” says Musavi, 26, who recently fled Iran and shared his account of the experience with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda. “The entire time, the interrogator threatened me and insisted I sign everything — documents describing whom I had been in contact with, which demonstrations I had participated in, what reports and footage I had prepared, and to whom I had sent them.”

Musavi, who had been arrested for participating in and documenting the Green Movement protests, cried throughout the incident. “I felt so much pressure,” he says. Finally, the interrogation ended and guards took him back to his cell in the prison’s infamous Section 209, the solitary confinement ward where he was to spend the next seven months.

Any relief at the interrogation ending was short-lived. Within minutes, two men had entered Musavi’s cell and handcuffed his hands to a radiator affixed to the prison wall, so high that Musavi, already exhausted, could not sit down. As the hours passed, he watched as his hands turned purple from the pressure of the handcuffs and lack of blood.

“I was so weak, and the guard would open the cell door, put some food on the floor and close the door. I couldn’t move a muscle, let alone reach for the food,” he says. “I lost consciousness for some time, and when I came to, I panicked when I looked at my hands. They had turned black and purple by then. It was a very strange condition. My shoulders were numb; I couldn’t move them.”

A day later, guards entered his room and removed the handcuffs. Musavi fell to the ground, drained of all strength, as he felt the blood begin to flow back into his hands. The guards dragged him back to the interrogation room. The pile of papers had quadrupled. Musavi, desperate, said he was ready to sign whatever they put before him, but his hands were still too numb to hold a pen. So the guard brought an ink pad, and one by one, Musavi marked each piece of paper with a single fingerprint.
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Day after day the interrogations continued, much as they had since security agents had stormed his Tehran apartment on April 1, posing as gas repairmen. They kicked him in the stomach, handcuffed him from behind, and combed every inch of his home — even the meat in his refrigerator — before taking his computer, camera, and mobile phone to look for evidence of Musavi’s participation in the postelection protests.

But it wasn’t just Musavi’s role in the Green Movement that had made him a target of the authorities. His family history had contributed as well. It was something his interrogator liked to remind him of, every day, as he returned him to his cell. “We’re going to execute you,” the man would say, in a voice that would make Musavi shiver. “Just like your mother and father.”

There is a lot more. Read it all, but be forewarned that the story shocks the conscience—as does the fact that there are many other Iranians suffering similar or worse forms of persecution.