Woman Risks Iran's Wrath to Protest Canadian's Death
August 12, 2003
Toronto Star
Ali Akbar Dareini
TEHRAN - A woman activist held a three-hour sit-in outside Iran's most notorious prison today to protest the July death of a Canadian photojournalist while in police custody and "lack of security" for prisoners.
Azam Taleqani said her sit-in at Evin Prison in northern Tehran was a "symbolic" gesture of protest against the trampling of freedoms and the rights of prisoners by the hardline ruling Islamic establishment in Iran.
"I held a sit-in to protest the death in prison of Zahra Kazemi and the judiciary's failure to inform the public about who was behind the crime," Taleqani told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
Taleqani said she was approached by prison officers, curious to know the reason for her sit-in. The officers asked her to leave, without forcing her.
Kazemi, 54, died July 10, nearly three weeks after she was detained for taking photographs outside a Tehran prison during student-led protests.
Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi said Kazemi had been murdered. Earlier, a presidential committee that investigated Kazemi's death shied away from calling the death intentional, saying she died of a "fractured skull, brain hemorrhage and its consequences resulting from a hard object hitting the head or the head hitting a hard object."
A judicial inquiry into the death led to the detention of five Intelligence Ministry agents, two of whom were released earlier this month on bail.
Canada withdrew its ambassador after Kazemi was buried in her birthplace, the southern Iranian city of Shiraz, against the wishes of Canadian authorities and her son, who lives in Montreal.
"The mysterious death of Kazemi creates greater concerns about the safety of prisoners. How can we be sure that political prisoners don't meet the fate of Kazemi in jail?" asked Taleqani, who is close to the outlawed Freedom Movement of Iran. She said she is also concerned about prisoners held in solitary confinement for months without trial.
The Freedom Movement — which opposes the clerics ruling Iran — rejects violence and seeks peaceful but profound democratic changes.
Taleqani is the daughter of the late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, a highly respected liberal cleric in the early years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Kazemi's death has become a new point of contention between Iran's elected reformers — who support President Mohammad Khatami's program of democracy and social freedoms — and unelected hardline conservatives, who stubbornly resist them.
Hardliners have closed down more than 90 pro-democracy publications and jailed several dozen writers and political activists in the last three years, almost all of them without trial or in closed trials without a jury.
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