Saeed Masouri, the longest held political prisoner in Iran, sent an open letter from Raja’i Shahr Prison, reacting to the upcoming developments, including the clerical regime’s sham presidential election.
Noting the increasing infighting within the regime, in part of the letter, Saeed Masouri wrote: “For years, this game spilt the blood of thousands of young Iranians in the streets, and mutilated them in prisons and safe houses. In the streets, they splashed acid on the face of women. They engulfed the young people in poverty, unemployment and despair. Many children were pushed to the junk yards to look through the garbage.
“My vote is regime change” has become popularized in Iran. Why? We can ask this from people whose backs have been broken under poverty and do not have even a meager food to survive. We can ask the reason from child laborers, from those who sift through the garbage, and those who sleep in empty graves… One can ask this question from the Baluch fuel carriers and the Kurdish porters. One can ask this from workers, nurses, teachers and the retired pensioners who demand their usurped wages every day. One can ask this question from girls and boys who do not have any authority over their life and lifestyle nor on the way they want to dress… One can ask the mothers whose children died in November 2019 in the streets and marshes. And one can ask this from the families of the victims of the Ukrainian aircraft, and the families who lost their loved ones because of the deliberate ban imposed on the import of vaccines. One can ask this question from all the political prisoners and their families, and from me, who have spent 21 years in prison because of supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organization… The same organization that emphasized in June 1981 on the regime’s lack of capacity to reform and did not back off despite the slaughter, torture and imprisonments in the 1980s.”
Saeed Masouri has been imprisoned in Iran since January 8, 2001, for being a supporter of the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
He was arrested after returning to Iran from Norway, where he had gone to study in the late 1980s. His family members had been unaware of Saeed’s return to Iran and only found out when the Intelligence and Security Ministry called the family in May 2001 to say Saeed had been arrested.
Masouri spent 13 months in solitary confinement at a prison in the southwestern city of Ahvaz before being transferred to Tehran in May 2002 for a 10-minute trial at the Iranian capital’s Revolutionary Court.
Saeed Masouri was sentenced to death on May 25 of that year for allegedly collaborating with the PMOI/MEK to “harm national security” and was jailed at Tehran’s Evin prison.
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2007 under pressure from the rights groups and Saeed Masouri was transferred from Evin to Raja’i Shahr prison of Karaj in 2009.
Saeed Masouri has written and signed multiple letters about poor conditions in Iran’s prison system in recent years including a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2016 to raise the alarm about what he said were threats to the lives of prisoners at Raj’i Shahr.
