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November 24, 2025

The night of 11th of Esfand, as narrated by Mehdi Khodayi.

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Reza Moridi, representative of the Ontario Parliament in Canada, supports the campaign of November 11 and Mehdi Khodaei – photo of the peace line – Siavash Bahman.

The time of my arrest was midnight on February 11, 2009. As I was leaving my house, I was arrested by plainclothes agents of the Sepah Pasdaran Intelligence. When I asked for the reason for my arrest and requested to see the arrest warrant, among several warrants, they showed me a paper that accused me of “acting against national security of the country”! After my arrest, without being informed of my transfer location, I was taken to prison with handcuffs and a blindfold. Based on my previous experience with arrests, I realized that I was in Evin prison and when I was placed in solitary confinement, I remembered a picture of Mohammad Ali Abtahi on the internet, showing him reading the Quran in solitary confinement in Band 2-A of Sepah prison; but for 10 days after my arrest, the interrogators did not give me any information about my location and only after they were sure that I was aware of where I was,

The first questions were about the membership and responsibilities of children in the human rights activists group in Iran, as well as the relationship between the children themselves. At the same time, I could hear the interrogators shouting at Mahboubeh Karami from the adjacent interrogation rooms.

I was questioned extensively about the student section of the collection and the sessions defending the right to education that we had organized before the 88 presidential election in Tehran and several other cities, as well as the meetings I had with other members of the group. Of course, these questions were accompanied by beatings and threats; threats of execution and the use of electric shocks and being put in the same cell as smugglers, emphasizing that I may be violated multiple times a day. (I truly couldn’t understand the reason for these actions towards human rights activists). It was only when I was almost unconscious from the punches that the first interrogation session ended! And I was transferred to my cell. For the next 10 days, no one came to see me, and during those 10 days, I witnessed my other friends being taken to the interrogation room through the small window at the bottom of my cell door. Later, when I was placed in a cell with Nasour Naghipour, Abdolre

The interrogators’ questions revealed that they had no information about us and the activities of the human rights activists in Iran; it seemed as though they had arrested us first and then searched for a reason for our arrest! They initially spoke about our connections with various countries, including America and England, and accused us of trying to incite people by reporting on the killings and injuries of the Green Movement. However, in the end, they accused us of blackening the image of the Islamic Republic by publishing cases of human rights violations in the country. Every time I emphasized during the interrogations that even if there was any blackening, it was the result of the actions of the agents and commanders, and that all of our activities were in accordance with the constitution and we had not done anything against it, but their response was always a meaningless and nonsensical sentence: “You do not have the authority to interpret the constitution!”

In the following, we were under a lot of pressure to obtain a televised confession. A confession that was forcibly obtained through beating and mistreatment, including for some of the children, such as Abdolreza Ahmadi. However, my interrogator first tried to pressure me into giving a televised confession by promising my freedom and then threatening me with long-term imprisonment, but ultimately failed. After my interrogators became aware of the independent nature of the work and tried to convince individuals to not cooperate and cut ties with this human rights institution after their release, they resorted to tactics such as threatening individuals, creating distrust among them, or accusing other members of moral wrongdoing. For each individual, depending on their mental state and religious beliefs, they would choose different methods to cut off cooperation.

During this time, what was most surprising was that in the widespread arrests that took place on February 29, 2010, sometimes individuals were mistakenly arrested due to their similar names. Interestingly, one of our friends named Mr. “Sama Noorani” was interrogated in several sessions instead of Ms. “Sama Bahmani”, another one of our friends, and the interrogators did not realize this mistake! This and similar incidents were evidence of the haste and lack of planning in dealing with human rights activists during that period of time.

Mehdi Khodayi
March 22, 2014

Monthly Magazine Issue 34