TEHRAN, 10 August 2005 — The hard-line judiciary claimed yesterday that Iran’s most prominent political prisoner, Akbar Ganji, has ended a two-month hunger strike amid calls from lawyers and his own wife to end the protest. “He stopped his hunger strike and it was after this (decision) that some people asked him to cease,” said judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi-Rad, without specifying when Ganji had halted the hunger strike, which was started on June 11.
The comments appear to refer to a call from Iranian Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi who on Sunday urged her client to put an end to his hunger strike.
This is not the first time the judicial authorities have said Ganji has ceased his action and on previous occasions Ganji’s relatives and lawyers have denied the information, saying he was pressing on with the hunger strike. However, this time it is especially difficult to verify the news given that the judicial authorities are no longer allowing Ganji’s relatives and lawyers to visit him.
Ebadi said in a letter to her client: “It is my duty, as one of your lawyers and someone who reads your articles, to sincerely ask you to break the hunger strike and start eating to make your friends and family happy.” Ebadi added that her calls come “in response to Mrs. Ganji’s call on everyone,” after Ganji’s wife begged his supporters to urge him to stop his hunger strike amid mounting concerns about his health. Ganji, 46, was recently transferred from Tehran prison to Milad hospital.
The dissident journalist was sentenced in 2001 to six years in prison after he wrote articles implicating several regime officials in the murders of opposition intellectuals and writers. He is holding the hunger strike to be unconditionally released from prison and to protest his conditions of incarceration.
