Farangis Mazloumi, mother of the political prisoner Soheil Arabi, set up her New Year arrangement (Haft Sin) outside the Greater Tehran’s Prison declaring that she will not celebrate Nowruz until her son is released.
This is the fourth Nowruz that Farangis Mazloumi has not celebrated since her son was arrested in 2013.
Many families of political prisoners including Atena Daemi’s family went to prisons and set up their Haft Sin arrangement for Nowruz outside prisons where their loved ones are imprisoned.
Soheil Arabi, a father of a young daughter, was arrested by Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) in 2013, for publishing photos of the 2009 uprising, cartoons of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and articles about the Iranian Regime. He was tortured in the prison’s solitary confinement ward.
In 2014, he was sentenced to death by a court in Tehran on charges of insulting the sanctifies and the Muslim’s prophet via Facebook. Then, after an international outcry, Iran’s Supreme Court commuted his sentence to 7.5 years in prison and an additional three years in prison and 30 lashes for insulting regime leaders.
However, the mullahs’ inquisition court is also forcing him to do two years of religious investigation, which includes reading the mullahs’ absurd ‘religious’ writings and write a summary of it.
Soheil Arabi started a hunger strike on January 24, 2018, in protest to the beating and unlawful transfer of political prisoners Atena Daemi and Golrokh Iraee from Evin to Qarchak Prison.
He went on dry hunger strike when on March 17, 2018, he was badly beaten up by prison guards. He suffered heavy blows to the head and was suspected of brain damage.
Upon the request of her mother and mothers of political prisoners of the movement seeking democracy and equality, he stopped his hunger strike after 55 days at the turn of the New Persian Year.
