Kamal Jafari Yazdi, Political Prisoner in Iran, Announces Medication Strike
Kamal Jafari Yazdi, a political prisoner held in Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, announced a medication strike starting Thursday, the first day of Mehr month.
Pouran Nazemi, a civil activist, told Voice of America about the condition of this political prisoner, who is one of the signatories of a statement calling for Khamenei’s resignation. She said he has announced that in protest against severe pressure on political prisoners, he will no longer use his medications starting today.
On Wednesday during a prison visit, Kamal Jafari’s cellmates showed a handwritten note from him stating that “despite vital need for medications, I will refrain from taking and using drugs starting the first of Mehr.”
According to Nazemi’s statements, Kamal Jafari Yazdi, according to the prison doctor’s diagnosis, legal medicine specialist, and the head of Qaem Hospital in Mashhad, should “urgently” undergo surgery. However, over the past six months, Vakilabad Prison authorities have not only refused to send him to the hospital and grant him medical leave, but have also banned visits to him and cut off his phone.
Pouran Nazemi also told Voice of America’s Persian service that Kamal Jafari Yazdi “has been threatened with death multiple times and is going through very harsh conditions,” and relatives of this political prisoner are concerned about his life being in danger.
In recent days, at least two prisoners have died in Iranian prisons. Amnesty International issued a statement on September 24, saying that the Islamic Republic has evaded accountability over the past eleven years regarding the deaths of at least 72 detainees.
Amnesty International cited in this statement, for example, the lack of any accountability regarding the death of Yaser Mangoori, whose death was announced to his family on September 17, 1400 (2021) by officials from the Ministry of Intelligence in Urmia.
The General Administration of Tehran Province Prisons confirmed on Thursday, two days after news broke of Shahin Naseri’s death as a witness to torture of Navid Afkari in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Great Prison, by issuing a statement.
