TEHRAN: More than 145 people detained after Iran’s disputed June election were kept for several days in a room of 70 square meters at a Tehran jail, including three who died, a parliamentary report was quoted as saying on Sunday.
In rare official criticism of the treatment of post-vote detainees, the investigative committee’s report said Tehran’s then prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi ordered the group transferred to Kahrizak detention center, despite a lack of space there.
The report into the situation in Kahrizak after the election, read out in Parliament and cited by Iranian media, said the space where the detainees were held lacked proper ventilation and sanitary conditions. It rejected the initial claim by officials, including Mortazavi, that the three deaths were caused by meningitis, ILNA news agency said.
“Their deaths are attributed to various issues such as limitation of space, poor sanitary conditions, inappropriate nutrition, heat, lack of ventilation and ... also as a result of physical attacks,” ILNA reported.
Kahrizak was closed in July on the orders of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after at least three people, arrested during widespread unrest after the vote, died in custody there.
Last month, Iranian media said the judiciary had charged three Kahrizak officials with the murder of three pro-reform protesters arrested after the June 12 election.But the report also dismissed opposition accusations that some Kahrizak detainees had been sexually assaulted, ILNA said. “The committee arrived at no instances of sexual molestation and we reject the claim strongly,” it said.
The investigative committee consisted of at least six members of Parliament, both conservative and moderate MPs. Mortazavi had ordered the transfer of 147 post-election detainees from Tehran’s Evin jail to Kahrizak, south of the capital. “According to this report, Kahrizak officials first refrained from accepting the detainees because of the lack of availability of any space, but ultimately they were forced to take in the 147 detainees into a space of merely 70 sq. meters at the insistence of (Mortazavi),” Mehr news agency said.
“The detainees were kept for four days ... in this room without enjoying proper ventilation, suitable food and sanitary conditions and also in very hard punitive conditions,” it said.
Mortazavi, who played a key role in mass trials of leading reformers after the election, was replaced as Tehran chief prosecutor in late August and named Iran’s deputy prosecutor general.
The head of Parliament’s foreign policy and national security committee, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said that with the report the assembly had carried out its supervisory role and that it was now for the judiciary to take “relevant measures.”
