Kurdish rights activists pressured to make false confessions
Kurdish women’s rights activists are under pressure from the Intelligence Department of Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan Province.
Zhina Moddares Gorji, journalist and women’s rights activist, and Fariba Zand Karimi, a teacher who is also a women’s rights activist, are detained in solitary confinement under double pressure to make false confessions against themselves.
The two activists from Sanandaj have been deprived of calling their families and having visitations.
Zhina Moddares Gorji was violently arrested on April 10, 2023, by agents of the Intelligence Department as she was returning home from her workplace at a bookstore.
She had been arrested and detained during the Iran uprising in 2022 but was released on bail after 40 days of detention in the women’s ward of Sanandaj Prison on October 30, 2022.
Fariba Zand Karimi, 35, is a contract teacher with the Department of Education and a women’s rights activist in Sanandaj. She was arrested at 8 p.m. on April 5, 2023, after being summoned to the Department of Intelligence of Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province in western Iran.
A university professor is deprived of the right to teach and work
Bahar Zangiband, a professor of physical education at Azad University in Sanandaj, has been banned from teaching and working at the university by the security forces. She has been working as a lecturer at the university for seven consecutive years, but in the last six months, she has been banned from attending classes and teaching.
Ms. Zangiband is a lecturer at Azad University in Sanandaj and a women’s rights activist. Agents of the Intelligence Department of Sanandaj arrested her on September 20, 2022, during the Iran uprising on the Azad University of Sanandaj campus without a court order. They searched her house and confiscated her mobile phone, laptop, and personal belongings. She was transferred to the Correctional Center of Sanandaj.
Bahar Zangiband has been accused of disrupting public order and propagating against the state by the investigating section of the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office of Sanandaj for participating in the nationwide protests and issuing a statement condemning the actions of the special guard and anti-riot forces.
Ms. Zangiband, a women’s rights activist, was temporarily released on bail on October 8, 2023, until the end of the proceedings.
