Update: Kian Tajbakhsh, Prominent Intellectual, Arrested

(10 July 2009) Agents of the Security Police arrested Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh at his home in Tehran on the evening of 9 July, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today. The agents did not provide any legal justification for the arrest and took him to an undisclosed location.

Tajbakhsh joins more than 240 other prominent Iranian lawyers, activists, journalists, professors, human rights defenders, and students who have been arrested without warrants at their homes or places of work by unidentified agents and taken to undisclosed locations. These detainees are being held in incommunicado detention and the authorities have refused to provide any information regarding charges against them or their condition to their families.

The Campaign expressed its serious concerns about the fate of these prominent individuals in detention whose numbers are growing each day. The Campaign believes they are being held in solitary confinement and may be under torture to make false confessions.