weekly protest in front of the Parliament Hill and across from PM office commemorated Dr. Kazem Rajavi known as "The great martyr of Human Rights". Dr. Rajavi was assassinated by the Iranian regime's diplomats in Coppet- Geneva in 1990. Dr. Rajavi is Masood Rajavi's brother, one of the leaders of People's Mojahedin organization of Iran (PMOI, MEK) and the founder and head of National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).******
Following Mr. Kokabee’s surgery last Wednesday, Dr. Mohammad Maleki, the first post-revolution Chancellor of Tehran University, in a video message denounced his "inhumane" detention, which goes against "human rights."
Dr. Maleki urged young Iranians to "rise up and protest" such detentions of Iranian academics and university students by the regime.
Omid Kokabee had been pursuing post-doctoral studies in the United States. He was arrested in January 2011 when he returned to Iran to visit his family. He was held in solitary confinement for 15 months and was subjected to prolonged interrogations, and pressured to make “confessions.”
In May 2012, after an unfair trial in the regime’s Revolutionary Court he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for having “connections with a hostile government,” according to Amnesty International. His sentence was upheld on appeal in August 2012.
According to human rights groups, Iranian authorities unduly delayed Kokabee’s access to medical treatment in the past. In 2012, after an initial examination found that he had a tumor, Mr. Kokabee experienced a long delay in getting permission to be transferred from a prison health clinic to a hospital for critical medical examinations.
In an open letter written from prison in April 2013, Mr. Kokabee said: “During interrogations which were conducted in solitary confinement, while all my communication with my family and the outside world was cut off, and while I was constantly being put under pressure and threats by receiving news about the horrible physical and mental state of my family, I was asked again and again to write up various versions of my personal history after 2005.”
Omid Kokabee has also said that since he graduated from university in 2005 he had been “invited several times to work as a scientist and technical manager for military and intelligence projects.” This included being offered admission to a PhD program with full sponsorship by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. He declined all invitations.
Mr. Kokabee was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society in 2013, for “his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity, in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.”
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With the Syrian revolution against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad entering its sixth year, Tehran has escalated the presence in Syria of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), together with regular Iranian military units, who are waging a brutal campaign against the Syrian people and the moderate opposition. In recent weeks, a significant number of special commandos of Iran’s regular army have been killed in Syria, pointing to their extensive presence in that conflict. The failure of the IRGC, especially in the Aleppo’s zone and their massive casualties in recent months in Syria, has reportedly caused Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei to dispatch his regular army to bolster pro Assad forces in this criminal war. EIFA added: In addition to the IRGC and the Iranian army, tens of thousands of Iraqi criminal militias, including Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries, have been engaged in the massacre of the Syrian people under the command of Iran.
(Struan Stevenson was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014 and was President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq from 2009 to 2014)
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According to the reports, his health is in poor condition and he is suffering from weakness and a severe drop in blood pressure.
The Iranian regime’s courts have sentenced him to 21 years of imprisonment under the bogus charge of 'insulting the holy sanctities,' 'insulting the Supreme Leader,' 'gathering and colluding to act against national security,' 'disturbing public order by participating in illegal gatherings' and 'propaganda against the regime.' Mr. Amirgholi has gone on hunger strike in protest to being held in the dangerous prisoners’ ward instead of the ward for political prisoners.
Amirgholi, an advocate of children’s rights, was arrested by the notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) on December 1, 2014 over his support for the people of Kobani, northern Syria. He was previously arrested and expelled from university because of his student activism in 2008. He is now serving his 17th month behind bars in Ward 8 of Evin Prison.
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This hanging bring to at least 35 the number of people executed in Iran since the start of last week, while European officials such as Ms. Federica Mogheirini the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Italy's Prime Minister have been paying visits to Tehran. Three of those executed were women.
Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: 'Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before.'
'Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded' in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said. There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani ’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”
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Afghan civil and human rights activists staged a rally outside the Iranian regime's consulate in Herat, north-west Afghanistan, demanding justice over the rape and murder of a six-year-old Afghan girl in Iran earlier this month. Setayesh Ghoreishi was reported as missing on April 9 in the Iranian city of Varamin, south-east of Tehran. Her body was discovered the following day after she was assaulted and stabbed to death by the 17 year old Iranian boy who tried to dispose of her body by acid, according to the International Business Times. The protesters in Herat on Wednesday carried Setayesh's photo as they chanted slogans demanding justice.
Meanwhile in the Iranian capital Tehran last week the regime attacked a group of mourners who had prepared to gather to protest Setayesh's murder in front of Afghan embassy.
Her devastated family claimed that the Iranian regime's state media failed to give the case much coverage, due to their status as Afghan migrants, and asked that the perpetrator be treated the same as he would if the case was reversed and a migrant had killed a young Iranian girl.
The case sparked a huge reaction on social media, where the hashtag #IamSetayesh was shared to raise awareness of the under-reported case.
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In the afternoon of April 20, 2016, political prisoner Ali Moezzi, father of two PMOI members, who is in Section 8 of the notorious Evin Prison , was poisoned and due to lack of medical attention, his condition deteriorated. Hours later, he was taken to the Evin’s clinic just to save face but returned him to the ward without serious care or determining the cause of his poisoning.
Eliminating political prisoners with drugs and food poisoning is a conventional method by the regime. Political prisoner Shahrokh Zamani, suspiciously died in Gohardasht Prison September of last year. Valiollah Feiz-Mahdavi, Amirhossein Heshmat Saran, Afshin Ossanloo and Mansour Radpour, are among other prisoners who died in custody in suspicious circumstances. The regime’s coroner’s office has tried to justify their deaths by providing delusive reasons.
Sadeq Larijani, head of the regime’s Judiciary, in reaction to the US State Department annual report on human rights violations in Iran, denied suspicious deaths of political prisoners and called it an 'irrelevant allegation'.
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IBTimes UK, reported on April 22, that A human rights activist and member of the Iranian resistance has condemned Hassan Rouhani for 7,000 new morality police to patrol the streets ’suppressing women’. Farideh Karimi, member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ), said Rouhani had the power to halt the measures, which have so far carried reports from Tehran of armed police stopping girls as young as 12 for failing to veil ’correctly’, despite the president claiming the government could not interfere. Karimi said: 'Suppression of women is further institutionalized in Iran with each passing day. The regime’s suppressive institutions are ever more blatantly cracking down on women. This has been a tenet of the regime from its outset.'The addition of 7,000 forces dedicated to the suppression of women and further gender discrimination speaks well of the reality that Hassan Rouhani is no different from the other mullahs and the hopes for an improvement of women’s rights in Iran which some had advocated at the start of Rouhani’s tenure as President are a mirage.'
'According to the regime’s laws, Rouhani has the authority to halt the new suppressive measures against women,' Karimi added. 'By refusing to do so, he is in practice endorsing them.'
As soon as the crackdown came into effect on April 18 , several posts were shared on social media of women being stopped in their cars – reportedly for playing music too loud or mal-veiling – while one 15-year-old released a harrowing account of being threatened with jail for wearing makeup.
Iran – women: 7000 undercover moral security agents start their work
State-run Mizan website affiliated with the Iranian Judiciary wrote on April 18 that 7000 undercover police agents have been organized to work in line with the Moral Security Plan.
This was announced by Tehran’s Police Chief, Hossein Sajedi-nia. He said the agents would monitor vehicles whose passengers or drivers drop their veil and report them to police as one of their four main duties. “The agents would take down the vehicle's license plate number and text it to the Moral Security Police who would subsequently text the car's driver and ask her to report to the police at a specific time.” The Moral Security Plan was officially implemented on Saturday morning, April 16, 2016, on a large scale covering all the capital's main squares, commercial centers and major highways. The undercover agents began their activities on Monday, April 18, 2016.
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'After my recent post on my Facebook (Proverbs 17:7) about Iran government today, Iran intelligent police tried to hack my Facebook account but they haven’t been successful,' Abedini wrote, adding that it could also have been a threat for him to stop posting.
Abedini, who was held hostage inside Iran’s prisons for three and a half years for his Christian faith before being released in January, had earlier posted a comment insisting that despite Iranian officials’ denials, the Islamic Republic does indeed jail people for religious and political reasons.
'I have witnessed for years that thousands of Iranians have been in prison because of ’How they think,’ ... and I was one of them,' Abedini wrote.
'They could shout down their voices, there, but they cannot shut down my shout here, I am living in free land now,' he added. The pastor’s statements refer to denials by Iranian officials that they hold political prisoners, such as when Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CBS News in an interview last year that 'We [Iran] do not jail people for their opinions.'
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April 20, on Tuesday, April 19, a protest gathering by thousands of Iranian retirees of the steel industry continued for the third consecutive day in front of the regime’s parliament. The retirees who mostly have brought along their families coming from Isfahan to Tehran are protesting their unpaid wages and dividends in the past four months. The protesters chanted “Justice, justice, we shall not give in to abjection” and carried handwritten placards that read “Whatever they promised to us was thin air; whatever they told us was deception and duplicity.”
The oppressive forces tore up protesters’ banners and placards and raised terror and fear in them in an attempt to prevent the expansion of this protest and to stop other people from joining in.
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The 6-2 ruling is a victory for more than 1,000 victims of terrorism sponsored by Iranian regime, who have joined together to try to take control of the frozen assets parked in a Citibank account.
In a 24-page opinion on behalf of the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rejected the bank’s argument that the payment would violate separation of powers protections because Congress had weighed in on how the victims should be repaid.
In 2008, victims of multiple Iran-sponsored terror attacks went to court to get hold of $1.75 billion in Iranian assets held in a New York bank account. Among the litigants were relatives of people killed in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 attacks on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
