Mostafa Daneshju, lawyer of Gunabadi Dervishes who was arrested on July 7, was taken to Ward 209 of the notorious Evin prison.
Seven state security forces conducted a ‘no-knock’ raid on the early morning hours of Saturday, breaking down the door of his apartment with their guns drawn. They arrested the lawyer before his famliy members.
Majzooban Noor, the official website of the Gonabadi Dervishes reported that the security forces had a judicial arrest order from the Branch 3 of the Security Court.
Mostafa Daneshju had been prosecuted and his was recoked by the “Center for Legal Advisers and Attorneys at the Judiciary” due to “defending the rights of Gonabade Dervishe.”
Daneshjou started working as a lawyer in 2003, but was banned from practicing law in 2007 because of his peaceful advocacy in defense of the rights of Gonabadi Dervishes.
In September 2012, Daneshjou and six other Gonabadi lawyers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to seven years each for the charges of “spreading falsehoods,” “propaganda against the state” and “assembly and collusion against national security” for their alleged administration of the Majzooban-e Noor website, which provided news about the Dervishes. The prisoners were all granted early conditional release in 2015.
The formerly imprisoned lawyer and member of the Gonabadi Dervish order was expelled from university last year. He was finishing his second term in criminology at the Islamic Azad University of Tehran as a graduate student when he received the news in a phone call from the university’s administrative office on May 20, 2017.
