Prison authorities have put Maryam Akbari Monfared, an Iranian dissident serving a 15-year sentence, under pressure in Semnan prison where she was recently banished to.
Political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared has been under additional pressure since she was exiled from Evin Prison to the Prison of Semnan on March 9, 2021.
Prison authorities monitor all contacts she makes with her family and children.
Akbari Monfared is presently detained in the general ward of the Semnan Prison where she does not have access to her personal belongings. Her detention in the general ward is in violation of the principle of separation of crimes.
The first day after being banished to the Prison of Semnan, she was detained in an anti-drug detention centers where she was interrogated by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence.
An informed source says: “The sanitary conditions in the general ward of the Prison of Semnan are deplorable. Despite widespread outbreak of the coronavirus in prisons, everyone uses the same slippers. Prison authorities do not provide detergents or disinfectants to the inmates.”
“Since she was sent to the Prison of Semnan, Mrs. Akbari Monfared has not had access to her personal belongings or her telephone card. She has very limited time to make her daily calls which are done in the prison’s Security Office and in the presence of a prison guard,” the source added on the conditions of Maryam Akbari Monfared.
On March 9, Political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared was exiled from Evin Prison, where she has served more than 11 years of her 15-year sentence, 110 miles east to the central prison in Semnan, an extremely inaccessible location for her children.
She was transferred after signing an open letter with a number of other cellmates on March 1 condemning the death of political prisoner Behnam Mahjoubi due to lack of medical attention, as well as the transfer of “13 prisoners from the Women’s Ward” in Evin Prison to “scatter political prisoners… in the vain hope of breaking their circle of resistance.”
Maryam Akbari Monfared has three daughters and is serving her 12th year in prison. She was arrested on December 31, 2009, and tried on charges of supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran and convicted in May 2010 of the offence of “waging war against God”.
Her conviction was based on the fact that she had made phone calls to her relatives, who are members of the PMOI and had visited them. She has always denied the charges.
In June 2010, Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran presided over by notorious judge Abolghasem Salavati sentenced her to 15 years in prison.
She has been jailed without a single day of leave ever since her initial arrest on December 29, 2009.
