Iranian civil rights activist Narges Mohammadi was arrested Tuesday in Karaj, a city just outside Tehran. That reports her husband Taghi Rahmani on Twitter, and writes website HRANA, a news platform that publishes about civil rights activists in Iran. Mohammadi spoke out against, among other things, the death penalty in Iran and for the reform of the Islamic regime in the country.
Mohammadi attended Tuesday’s memorial service to a victim of the violence at a series of protests in Iran in November 2019. Thousands of people took to the streets as the regime decided to raise gasoline prices following US economic sanctions. The commemoration became “violent” when Iranian agents intervened, according to HRANA. Mohammadi was subsequently arrested.
Her husband, also pro-reform Iranian journalist Taghi Rahmani, says she is being held in Eving Prison in Tehran. There she would have been insulted and beaten, he writes. “Because we are no longer allowed to have telephone contact, we do not know how she is doing.”
Mohammadi was previously held in Eving Prison. In 2015, she was arrested and sentenced to 16 years in prison for setting up an illegal group, endangering state security and spreading propaganda. While incarcerated, Mohammadi, along with fellow inmate and journalist Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, went on hunger strike because they were denied access to care.
In October 2020, Mohammadi was suddenly released, but last summer she was sentenced again to 30 months in prison and 80 lashes for, among other things, defamation against the Iranian regime. “The reformists within the Iranian regime have reached a dead end,” she said in an interview with NRC in June. “And the Islamic regime has no potential for any reforms.”
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