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Iran opposition charges torture

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The BBC’s Jon Leyne reports that Iran’s opposition leaders continue to accuse the government of torturing and killing citizens arrested during protests that followed June’s disputed presidential election.

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JEB SHARP: In Iran the political turmoil that began after the country’s disputed presidential election in June continues. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the face of opposition protests. Today Ahmadinejad said senior opposition leaders should be punished for instigating those protests. He made the comment at Friday prayers in Tehran. Several opposition figures and activists are already on trial. Some have made public confession. Opposition supporters say the detainees were forced to make false confessions after being abused and tortured. The BBC’s Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne, who is now in London, has been examining that allegation. He prepared this report.

MOHAMMAD ALI ABTAHI: [SPEAKING FARSI]

TRANSLATOR: I took part in a street protest and I sincerely admit here that I did a bad thing and I apologize for taking part in an illegal gathering. I salute the supreme leader for saving the nation from a great danger and I thank him.

JON LEYNE: Former Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi makes a deep and sincere confession in the first of the ongoing series of trials of Iranian opposition figures.

IBRAHIM NABAVI: [SPEAKING FARSI]

TRANSLATOR: I apologize for starting a velvet revolution and misleading people and I request the most severe punishment for myself. I would like to thank all of my interrogators, the judges, the besieges who worked tirelessly in arresting people and I wish them every success.

LEYNE: Another almost identical confession. Only this was a spoof made by the satirist Ibrahim Nabavi and posted on YouTube before the real trials began – a sign of how little credibility many Iranians put on the current series of trials. Several years ago Mr. Nabavi himself had two sojourns in Tehran’s Evin prison.

IBRAHIM NABAVI: [SPEAKING FARSI]

TRANSLATOR: I almost feel like I am in the courtroom among the prisoners and it will be my turn next. It’s exactly what they did to us but now it’s much worse.

LEYNE: He told me what happens to you when you’re put under pressure from an Iranian interrogator.

NABAVI: [SPEAKING FARSI]

TRANSLATOR: You start to blame yourself. In a way you begin to agree with your interrogator who is also accusing you. Then you gradually develop a split personality – your old one and new one which accuses your old self.

LEYNE: It’s almost impossible to speak to former detainees still in Iran. But I have managed to speak to two people who were held in prison after the election and are now safely out of the country. Raza, who preferred to withhold his real name, said he was arrested simply because he strayed too close to a demonstration. Then he underwent a vicious interrogation.

RAZA: Two men came in and said you know it looks like you’re a trouble maker. You don’t want to cooperate with us and then they punched me in the face. I fell off the chair. Then they started kicking me in the face. I think that’s when they broke my nose and ….

LEYNE: In another session they tried a different approach.

RAZA: They pulled my trousers down and they threatened to rape me although they didn’t. And they said that I am an infidel and I am [PH] Baha’i, that I’m Jewish, that I don’t believe in God.

LEYNE: [PH] Shahab Mossavat is a journalist who used to work for the Iranian English-language station Press TV. He was arrested the day after the election. He said most of the pressure on him was psychological not physical but he saw plenty of evidence of maltreatment of others.

SHAHAB MOSSAVAT: I saw many people maltreated – brutally treated – tortured physically, psychologically. I didn’t see any sexual abuse but I did certainly see physical abuse. I saw people whose noses had been smashed so much so that they were flattened into their faces.

LEYNE: What has happened in Iran’s prisons has now become a huge political row after one of the opposition leaders, Mehdi Karroubi, alleged that some detainees have been raped and others have been tortured to death. His claims have been hotly disputed by the government. Chahad Mossadat said they certainly sounded credible.

MOSSAVAT: I’m absolutely confident they’re true. Because you see the thing is that it was a very, very short step from the treatment that we received to death occurring.

LEYNE: Both Shahab and Raza described a clear political motivation they saw in their jailers.

MOSSAVAT: They told us, very candidly, that the rallies in support of Mr. Mousavi which preceded the election in the couple of weeks before the pole, had riled them and that this was payback.

RAZA: Like I said, they have a skewed logic of what it is to be [INDISCERNIBLE] and faithful and whoever was there, regardless of what they knew about them, was this person who was anti-Iranian, anti-Islamic, and up to no good basically.

LEYNE: The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, has set up an inquiry into conditions in Iranian jails though he was quick to deny the allegations of rape. A senior cleric has said that the allegations are so false that Mr. Karroubi should be put on trial himself for libel.

SHARP: That report from the BBC’s Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne.

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