Iran: Letter from Jailed Blogger Details “Blue Sky of Pain”

Dr. Mehdi Khazali ^[1], a jailed Iranian blogger, publisher and government critic, wrote ^[2] a letter this month from prison describing a “blue sky of pain” of his first-hand experience with the injustice of jails in Iran where prisoners face torture and arbitrary death sentences.

Khazali’s daughter (see photo) and wife were briefly arrested too.

Mehdi Khazali’s letter was published in his personal blog (some activists pass on passwords to their blogs and Facebook accounts before they lose access themselves).

He writes [fa]:

One person was sentenced to death for receiving a fake one and half sentence email. What I see with my own eyes is that prisoners have no rights in revolutionary courts. Many have no rights to legal defense, nobody has the right to read his or her own file to be able to defend him or herself… You can’t even read the court’s sentence for you before you are forced to sign it.

The blogger adds:

Three prisoners who were in my cell were sentenced to 17 years in prison in a trial which lasted just two mintues. One of them has been on hunger strike for 10 days now… Three Christians are in prison too, just for their faith.

Khazali says prsioners who escaped mass executions ^[3]in 1988 and remain alongside him in prison, and have told him about coffins (some prisoners were put in coffins as a torture) and iron cages.

Khazali wrote ^[4] the letter to Ahmad Montazeri, the late Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri’s son. Ayatoolah Montazeri criticized mass executions and revealed some information on this topic.