A week after the arrest of an Iranian cartoonist and former political prisoner, Atena Farghadani, her lawyer said she was tortured in a safe house run by the regime’s security police.
Atena Farghadani was violently arrested on April 13, 2024, by security forces while putting up one of her caricatures on a wall in Pastor Street where the presidential palace is located.
Her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi initially said she was taken to Qarchak prison, but because of the severity of her injuries, she was not admitted to the prison and was subsequently transferred to the women’s ward of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
Moghimi wrote in his social media account, “To protest her harassment by security agencies, Atena Farghadani went to Pastor Street to put up a protest cartoon on the wall, when the IRGC Intelligence agents, using extreme violence, first took her to one of their safe houses and severely tortured her. She lost consciousness due to severe bleeding from her nose and the blows to her head, and hours later, regained consciousness in the prayer hall of the 8th Fateb police base where she found out some of her clothes had been removed.
“After receiving her clothes, she noticed that blood stains were washed out of her clothes, and on the morning of April 14, she was transferred to the Evin courthouse. She has been falsely charged with ‘spreading propaganda against the state’ and ‘insulting the sanctities’ (against the Shiites’ 12th Imam).”
On April 21, the authorities of Evin Prison planned to send Atena Farghadani to Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court for trial which she refused, arguing that she had not committed a crime and did not consider the Revolutionary Court to be legal. She has also refused to accept the counsel of lawyers approved by the judiciary.
