Kurdish student and civil activist Vian Mohammadi has started a hunger strike in the Central Prison of Urmia to protest her continued illegal detention.
An Interrogation Branch of the Revolutionary Court of Mahabad extended the warrant for the detention of this Kurdish student activist for another month on May 31, 2021.
Mrs. Mohammadi started a hunger strike on the same day in the Central Prison of Urmia, after which she was deprived of calling her family.
Vian Mohammadi, a management student, was arrested on April 30, 2021. Security forces initially took her to Evin Prison in Tehran. Subsequently, they returned her to the detention center of the IRGC Intelligence in Urmia, the capital of West Azerbaijan Province in northwestern Iran.
Finally, in June, the IRGC detention center released Mrs. Mohammadi after completing her interrogations and sent her to the Central Prison of Urmia.
An informed source said the Urmia Prison authorities transferred Vian Mohammadi to the quarantine ward on the third day of her hunger strike.
Vian Mohammadi’s husband, Faramarz Mohammadi, was arrested in Tehran in January 2021 during the Intelligence Ministry’s wave of arbitrary arrests of more than 120 Kurdish activists in various cities. Simultaneous with his arrest, Vian was also summoned to the IRGC Intelligence Organization in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan Province.
The hunger strike has turned into the only resort by political prisoners in the clerical regime’s jails to make their demands heard.
In May alone, five female political prisoners went on hunger strike in Qarchak, Evin, and Mashhad prisons. They were Saba Kord Afshari, Raheleh Ahmadi, Giti Pour-Fazel, Mojgan Kavousi, and Sakineh Parvaneh.
In a letter from Qarchak Prison on May 11, 2021, political prisoner Saba Kord Afshari wrote: “I have been on a hunger strike since May 8, 2021, refusing food and medicine in protest of all the killings, tortures, heartbreaks, and threats that are inflicted not only on political prisoners but also on their families.
