The lawyer of Ali Younesi and Amir Hossein Moradi, two elite imprisoned students, says his clients were transferred to the general wards of Evin Prison on Saturday night after 26 months in a security ward with “difficult conditions”.
Mostafa Nili wrote in a tweet on Sunday, June 26, that “the case officer had requested from the beginning that they should not be transferred from ward 209 until a final verdict is issued, and this happened in practice.”
Younesi’s brother also shared the news in a tweet on Sunday.
The cases of university students Ali Younesi and Amirhossein Moradi were handled by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry.
Ali Younesi is a silver and gold medal recipient in Iran’s National Astronomy Olympiad and the 2018 gold medal winner in China’s International Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad. Amirhossein Moradi is the silver medal recipient of Iran’s National Astronomy Olympiad.
In May 2020, a month after Younesi and Moradi were arrested, Judiciary Spokesman Gholam-Hossein Esmaili accused them of having contact with “counter-revolutionary groups” namely the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
During their detention, the Ministry of intelligence agents beat them and held them in prolonged solitary confinement in harsh conditions to extract forced “confessions”.
The court of first instance sentenced each of them to 16 years in prison on April 25, 22 on the charge of “corruption on earth” and “conspiracy and propaganda against the system”.
An appeals court in June upheld the sentence.
According to Article 134 of the Islamic Penal Code, allows defendants to serve only the longest sentence in cases involving multiple convictions, each of the students would have to serve 10 years behind bars.
On June 7, Mostafa Nili announced that the Tehran Court of Appeals had upheld the sentences, which are valid for 10 years.
