Iranian authorities launched a renewed campaign of arrests targeting several Kurdish activists.
A teacher, a firefighter and an ordinary man by the names of Sasan Babaei, Kaveh Moradi and Omid Kmangar, respectively, were arrested on February 5th and transferred to an unknown location.
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No information is available on their whereabouts or the reason for their arrests.
Sasan Babaei, a teacher and civil activist, has founded several mountaineering associations. He was arrested once in September 2006 and then held in Intelligence Ministry solitary confinement of Sanandaj, west of Iran for two months. He was eventually transferred to Sanandaj Central Prison.
This Kurdish teacher was sentenced to five years behind bars based on alleged charges of “measures threatening the establishment”.
On July 11th
, 2008, he was transferred to an Intelligence Ministry detention center in Sanandaj, where he was kept for 45 days and sentenced to a year in prison and three years in internal exile for sending letters to human rights organizations about the conditions of prisoners on death row.
