Ministry of Intelligence agents violently attacked two female Azerbaijani Turkic activists in an attempt to extract false confessions, leaving one in the hospital with broken teeth and injured fingers.
In late October, Ministry of Intelligence agents arrested Nasim Sadeghi and Hakimeh Ahmadi without explanation and sources close to the women reported that the pair were severely beaten.
According to Ahmadi’s husband Gholamreza Ghorbani, Hakimeh is hospitalized at the Tabriz Army Hospital, and the Intelligence Ministry agents have demanded that he pay the hospital and treatment fees.
In a video posted on sicial media on October 30, where Ghorbani explained that his wife had been severely injured – agents broke her fingers and two of her rib bones – and has now been moved to the hospital. He said that the authorities had refused to tell him which hospital she was in, forbade him from visiting, and said that he would be liable for the cost of the medical treatment.
The charges against Ahmadi, who was arrested on October 18 and threatened with a close-combat weapon, are still unknown.
Ms. Hakimeh Ahmadi, the mother of two young children, had previously been detained in September and was released after three days on a 100-million-touman bail.
Another civil activist woman, Nasim Sadeghi, who was sent to Tabriz Central Prison on October 29, told her family in a phone call that she’d been forced to confess after the authorities beat her and threatened to arrest her children and her sister’s children.
Although she was not originally told of her charges, the general prosecutor’s office reported that she was arrested for “propaganda against the government through anti-government news activity in cyberspace”.
She was finally released on October 31, on a bail of 150 million tomans. She had been arrested on her walk home on October 21.
Sadeghi was previously arrested in July, alongside dozens of other people, for taking part in a public protest against controversial comments published in the newspaper Tarh-e No. She was held and interrogated for five days in the Intelligence Detention Center of Tabriz on yet more bogus propaganda charges, before being released on a 1 billion rial bail.
