AHMAD BATEBI SURFACED IN EVIN PRISON
PARIS 27 Nov. (IPS) Ahmad Batebi, a young Iranian students who was abducted earlier this month after meeting
Ambeyi Ligabo, the United Nations’s Special Rapporteur, has been transferred to Evin prison and held in a special cell controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, student’s sources reported Thursday.Mr. Batebi was jailed four years ago for displaying the bloody shirt of a
friend wounded in clashes with the regime’s security forces. He was arrested
after a picture of him holding the bloodstained T-shirt was displayed in several
western publication, including the British influential weekly The Economist that
had printed it on its cover page.
He had been photographed during the first major anti-regime demonstrations by Iranian students in July 1999 and condemned to death, but the sentence was reduced to ten years of imprisonment, thanks mostly to national and international pressures.
Mr. Batebi was on a short leave from prison when went missing while on his way to a students meeting after talking briefly with Mr. Ligabo, according to his father and a lawyer.
In the absence of any reaction from the authorities, including the government, Iranian sources familiar with this kind of abductions speculated that the dissident student might have been arrested on orders from Judge Sa’id Mortazavi, the Prosecutor for Tehran and Islamic revolution courts.
"He (mortazavi) might have ordered the abduction of Batebi deliberately, just to show Ligabo and the international community that the Islamic Republic has its own laws independent from the outside world in the one hand and that the Judiciary is independent from the government", one senior analyst told Iran Press Service, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"He looked very tired and his face and body covered with bruises, marks of tortures", friends who saw him briefly in Evin reported to the Iranian Students United Front, a dissident organisation struggling for radical changes in the present clerical-led system.
"He said interrogators he could not identify were pressing him to make confessions they had submitted the text to him", the ISUF said in a statement, quoting Mr. Batebi.
Several Iranian students organisations expressed "deep and serious" concern over the fate of both Mr. Batebi and Akbar Mohammadi, another student also detained during the student’s anti-regime uprising of July 1998 and warned the authorities to free them "immediately and without any conditions" or they would alert international organisations.
Though the Iranian Judiciary claim there are no political prisoners in Iranian jail, but Iranian and international human rights groups confirm the presence of tens of prisoners of conscience, several of them leading journalists, researchers, scholars, lawyers and intellectuals
. ENDS BATEBI IN EVIN 271103