Vida Mehrannia, wife of prominent academic Ahmadreza Djalali, who has been sentenced to death, said that on the day that they announced Ahmadreza’s death sentence in the 15th Branch of the Revolutionary Court, Judge Salavati told him that he should not write the details of his case in the defense documents and that he should not send them from prison.
“(Judge Salavati told him) that you can only write that you have an objection. This was in reality an excuse so that he would not be able to complete his defense”, she added.
Ahmadreza Djalali ‘s mother also said that they had threatened to kill Ahmadreza’s children in Sweden if he did not cooperate with them.
Iranian courts have long been accused of issuing politically motivated sentences by human rights advocates. Trials are often held behind closed doors, and may last only a few minutes. Charges, and even verdicts, can be left to public speculation rather than informing defense teams or family. However, the execution of Iranian-Swedish professor Ahmadreza Djalali seems inevitable according to the Free University of Brussels (VUB), where Djalali was a guest professor in the field of disaster medicine.
Iranian authorities detained Djalali, a scientist at the Research Center in Emergency and Disaster Medicine (CRIMEDIN) run by the University of Eastern Piedmont in Novara, Italy, and the Free University Brussels (VUB), during a visit in April, when he had traveled to Iran to attend a scientific workshop based on an official invitation from an Iranian university. He was accused of providing information to Israel to help it assassinate several senior nuclear scientists.
