Shahrnaz Akamli, Mother of One of the 2009 Protests Victims, Returned to Prison
Shahrnaz Akamli, mother of Mostafa Karim Bigi, one of the victims killed during the protests following the 2009 election, went to Evin Prison on Wednesday, December 25 (Persian calendar) to serve her one-year prison sentence.
Shahrnaz Akamli announced this news on Twitter and wrote: “I am taking my son’s picture with me to prison because I know he is my heart’s strength. I am a mother whose crime is seeking justice and repetition and a simple question that I have never received an answer to: Who killed my son?”
Ms. Akamli further thanked those people who stood by her and her family, and added: “We are also relatives and have no shelter except each other. In hope of better days.”
Similarly, Maryam Karim Bigi, Ms. Akamli’s daughter, also published a photo on Twitter of the moment of saying goodbye and her mother’s departure to Evin Prison.
Ms. Akamli, who over the past 10 years has consistently sought justice and identification of those responsible for killing her son, has been sentenced to one year of punitive imprisonment, travel ban, deprivation of political activities, and deprivation of cyberspace membership on charges of “propaganda activity against the system.”
Her son, Mostafa Karim Bigi, during the protests against the results of the 2009 presidential election on the 6th of Dey (December 27, 2009), which coincided with Ashura, was shot in the head and killed.
According to reports, security authorities handed over his body to his family on the condition that his burial be held outside Tehran, away from his residence, and that no one except his father, mother, and sister be present at the ceremony. Mostafa’s body was buried in Shahriar weeks after his death.
The execution of Shahrnaz Akamli’s sentence, as one of the mothers of protest victims and her going to prison, comes at a time when the Islamic Republic continues to witness public protests following the downing of the Ukrainian plane and the killing of 176 people due to a missile fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Following these protests, President Trump and US officials warned the Iranian regime and called for no suppression of protesters.
The US State Department has repeatedly condemned violent crackdowns and widespread suppression of protesters in various cases, as well as the repeated and continuous violation of Iranian citizens’ rights by the country’s ruling regime.
Source: Voice of America
