Dozens of Mountain Climbers Arrested for Unknown Reasons

Sanandaj Police’s Intelligence Unit raided a meeting of mountain climbing group Chel Cheme in the village of Hassan Abad outside Sanandaj and arrested dozens of meeting participants on 17 February, a local human rights activist told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. It is unclear why these individuals were arrested.

The human rights activist also told the Campaign that the previous day, 16 February, security forces arrested three Kurdish citizens—Salman, Sadegh, and Soheila Jafari—after searching their homes and taking some of their personal items. These arrests occurred as part of a raid on the village of Khorooseh near Shooyesheh in Kurdistan Province, during which security forces also stormed the homes of several other village residents and collected satellite dishes. The reasons for these arrests are not yet known.

Since the arrests, families of the arrested mountain climbers have gathered daily outside the IntelligenceOffice to find news about their detained kin, the source told the Campaign. The source added that the Intelligence Office has promised the families to release their detained relatives on bail of about 40 million toman (the equivalent of $2,000 USD in today’s exchange rate.)

According to the source, the names of the detained mountain climbers are as follows: Shahla Hosseini, Ali Bahrami, Fardin Mehdi, Ghotbeh Ahmadi, Farha Chatani, Reza Niknam, Hashem Rostami, iran Parvin, Bakhtiar Saeedi, Mohammad Goulian, Diako Kakakhani, Nader Peymankar, Heydar Akhteh, Akbar Mohammadi, Souran Khezrani, Shamsollah AbdollaHI< Borhan Pir Khezrani, Abdollah Karimi, Ghaleb Zamani, Ali Ahmadi, Ali Azadi, Rahmat Gouyli, Ghias Hosseini, Jalal Sajjadi, Tofigh Aminpanah, and Mohammad Fatehi.