Swedish Resident Facing Death in Iran Details How He Was Forced to Make False Statements
The wife of a Swedish resident imprisoned in Tehran has revealed the way her husband, Ahmadreza Djalali, was coerced into making potentially incriminating statements before he was sentenced to death for allegedly engaging in espionage.
In a letter obtained by the Center For Human Right in Iran (CHRI), Djalali’s wife, Vida Mehran-nia, said her husband is a victim of the “inhumane” actions that led to his conviction in a “show trial.”
The letter, addressing the Iranian Vice President For Citizens’ Rights Shahindokht Mowlaverdi, also quotes Djalali’s words from phone conversations with his wife, including his statement that he was “forced to repeat a dictated text in front of a camera under threat.”
— In addition to repeated threats of execution when I was in solitary confinement, “I was not allowed to contact my children for 21 days so that the interrogators could persuade me to think that they had arrested them.”
— “I was physically attacked, threatened, tortured, humiliated and insulted repeatedly.”
— “I was asked tricky questions and forced to write answers in a certain way. Despite my hesitation, I was filmed on two occasions without my written or verbal consent and forced to repeat a dictated text in front of a camera under threat.”
— “Studying my case file, the accusations against me, the interrogations, the way I fell into the trap of aggressive foreign agents, my defense statements and evidence, as well as the blatantly false and contradictory documents and claims by the interrogators will prove that I have not committed any act against national security. The deputy prosecutor’s indictment charging me with ‘Corruption on Earth’ for acting against national security… lacks any real or credible evidence. It is only based on the interrogators’ false reports and malicious guesswork and therefore null and void in the eyes of the law and Sharia.”
In her letter, Mehran-nia demanded that the body charged with investigating human rights violations in Iran, the High Council for Human rights, investigate her husband’s complaints.
“The relevant authorities, including Mr. Javad Larijani, the director of the judiciary’s human rights headquarters, are ignoring this case as if they have no responsibility to investigate human rights violations in Iran,” she said.
She continued: “Therefore, I will list the illegal and unconstitutional actions against my husband for your attention as well as for the president, who has sworn to protect the Constitution and Islamic law, and for the entire nation of Iran and the world.”
“The Iranian authorities will now have no more excuses in the presence of God and the honorable people of Iran,” added Mehran-nia
A researcher in disaster medicine, Djalali has been accused of providing information to Israel that was allegedly used for the assassination of Iranian scientists. Agents of the Intelligence Ministry arrested him in April 2016 while traveling to Iran from Sweden on the invitation of Tehran University to speak about his expertise in disaster medicine.
In October 2017, Djalali, who lived in Sweden with his wife and two children, was sentenced to death for the charge of “collaborating with a hostile government” by a Revolutionary Court in Tehran. The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence on December 5, 2017.
“My husband, Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, a researcher and university professor in European countries, has been in prison for the past 22 months, during which he has been subjected to the most inhumane actions against the law and Sharia,” wrote Mehran-nia.
“Then he was put on an engineered show trial and convicted on the basis of false charges, without any evidence, and sentenced to death,” she said.
“Despite all the human rights violations against my husband, we have always tried to respect the law and pursue the matter through legal channels,” added Mehran-nia. “However, we have gained no results and no one has even given us a response.”
