Niloufar Bayani's revelation; Rouhani's deputy: I am not aware of it

Eshaq Jahangiri says he is not aware of Niloufar Bayani's letters, but the issue is being pursued by the government. The defendant has revealed the environmental case, sexual threats, and physical and psychological torture by IRGC intelligence agents during 1,200 hours of interrogation.

A day after the letters from the second-tier defendant in the environmental case describing the process of his interrogations were made public, Rouhani's deputy reacted to it. Eshaq Jahangiri said on the sidelines of a government meeting: "I have not seen this letter and I am not aware of its subject. We will definitely raise it in the government on Sunday. If necessary, we will assign people in the government to talk to the head of the judiciary."

Niloufar Bayani, an environmental expert at the Parsian Wildlife Institute, wrote in her letter that the interrogators forced her to imitate animal sounds, threatened her with air injections and "paralyzing injections," and showed her a photo of the body of Kavoos Seyed-Emami so that she would know what would happen if she did not cooperate.

Niloufar Bayani, a biology graduate from McGill University in Canada and a master’s degree in wildlife conservation from Columbia University in the United States, returned to Iran in the summer of 2017 and was arrested in the winter of that year. The Revolutionary Court sentenced her to 10 years in prison and forfeited her six years of work at the United Nations.

Letters written by Ms. Bayani to authorities from prison were published on BBC Persian on Tuesday, February 19. In a January 2018 letter to the head of Ward 2-A of the IRGC detention center, she stated that a large team, during lengthy interrogations, “would present the dirtiest sexual insults in disgustingly imaginative detail and would ask me to complete their sexual fantasies.”

In another letter to Khamenei in February 2018, Niloufar Bayani also said that she was once taken to a private villa in Lavasan with seven armed men, "to be forced to watch their immoral and un-Islamic behavior in a private swimming pool, despite her refusal."

Social media reaction

The publication of Niloufar Bayani's letters and the revelation of the IRGC's treatment of her has sparked a wave of reactions on social media. Environmental activist Mojgan Jamshidi writes: "If you haven't died by now, you won't die or tremble from the shame of what has befallen Niloufar Bayani and other environmental detainees. Don't say we don't know! We're investigating... You've known for two years that these people are innocent, and you didn't do anything! You won't do anything after this either..."

One Twitter user wrote: "Even if one percent of the accounts of the torture inflicted on Niloufar Bayani in prison are true, Friday should be declared a national day of mourning instead of election day."

Abbas Milani, a historian and author, writes: “As a human being, I am ashamed that the savages who tortured and interrogated Niloufar Bayani, the leader who read her letter of protest and did nothing, and the other savages who beat and tortured Bahareh Hedayat and went unpunished, all call themselves Iranians and human beings. Shame.”

Journalist Morteza Kazemian also tweeted: "Two decades have passed since the discovery and publication of the horrific torture films of Saeed Emami. The unfortunate story of Niloufar Bayani is following in the same footsteps. The only difference is that the head of the Inspection Organization at the time has become the head of the judiciary; the IRGC Intelligence Organization has become the main intelligence agency of the regime; and the leader has become more authoritarian."

Mostafa Tajzadeh, a reformist political activist, said: "Messrs. Rouhani, Raisi, Larijani, what Ms. Niloufar Bayani, an environmental activist, published about the ugly and inhumane behavior of her interrogators, is shameful and unjustifiable. All three of you are complicit in this tragedy if you do not immediately take decisive action to clarify the truth, punish the perpetrators, and rectify the situation."

Previously, in the winter of 2018, the "Kalmeh" website had written in a report that Ms. Bayani had turned to others in the second court session and shouted: "If you were given injections and threatened like me, you would have confessed. People have kept me in solitary confinement for the past few months. They beat me and forced me to confess. They are taking me to Salati to execute me."

The defendants in the Bahman 2017 environmental case were arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Organization and their closed-door trial began in the winter of 2018. The Environmental Protection Organization and the Ministry of Intelligence have denied the espionage charges against them.

Kavous Seyed Emami, one of the detainees in this case, died suspiciously in prison two weeks after the group was arrested, and the cause of his death was declared "suicide."

Source: DW