Political prisoner Saba Kord Afsahari would not be entitled to any prison leaves due to Coronavirus outbreak and Kurdish artist Parisa Saifi was sentenced to three years in prison.
Upon inquiry of the Kord Afshari family from the Assistant Prosecutor of Evin Prison to receive prison leaves for Saba Kord Afshari and her mother, Raheleh Ahmadi, they were informed that Saba Kord Afshari would not be granted any prison leaves because her sentence is more than five years but her mother might be.
Mrs. Raheleh Ahmadi, however, announced that she would not leave without her daughter. She said, “Just as I was the voice of my daughter outside prison, I would continue to be her voice inside prison, too, to echo her innocence and her oppression. In light of the Corona virus outbreak, I would not leave without my daughter.”
The reason the Kord Afshari family requested for prison leave for Saba and her mother was that several prison guards in the Women’s Ward of Evin have contracted the infection.
Last week in Tehran, a large number of families of political prisoners and their lawyers gathered outside the office of Vaziri, the Assistant Prosecutor of Evin, to demand prison leave for their relatives. None of them were accepted by Vaziri. Instead, they were told that the office was preparing a list to send to the Prosecutor’s Office to be decided on. They said they would contact and inform any family whose prisoner was going to be released.
In another development, Parisa Saifi, a Kurdish artist, was sentenced to three years in prison by the Revolutionary Court of Sanandaj, Iranian Kurdistan.
Ms. Saifi had been released temporarily from jail on February 23, 2020 on a heavy bail of 300 million tomans after going on hunger strike.
Parisa Saifi was arrested at home on November 12, 2019 by agents of the IRGC Intelligence, and transferred to the Correctional Center of Sanandaj (women’s prison). She was under interrogation for 100 days to extract false confessions from her.
This cultural and art activist went on hunger strike on February 9, 2020, despite bad physical and mental conditions to protest her undetermined status and pressures on her by intelligence institutes to extract false confessions.
Ms. Saifi has been sentenced to three years in jail, while the Coronavirus outbreak has spread in all Iranian prisons and endangering the lives of all prisoners due to lack of medical resources in prisons.
