Kin of Detainees Seek Prosecution of Iran Officials

In an unusually bold public request, families of three antigovernment protesters who died after beatings at Iran’s notorious Kahrizak prison have demanded the prosecution of high-ranking officials responsible for running the extralegal detention center.
The families, in a letter to Iran’s judiciary published widely in Iranian media, stated that they were prepared to spare the lives of two prison officers who were convicted of murder, under the Islamic legal provision of ghesas, which grants the families of murder victims the right to either request or forgo the death penalty for the killers. Instead, the families called for the punishment of the officers’ supervisors.
“We do not gain pleasure from revenge nor spilling the blood of the puppets of those who have broken the law,” the letter of the three families reads, referring to the two unnamed individuals sentenced to death in closed-door trials for beating detainees to death.
The letter demanded an “unbending and uncompromising” investigation and punishment of the “political, judicial and security officials” involved in the deaths.
Chief among the officials under scrutiny is Saeed Mortazavi, a former Tehran prosecutor and one of eight people whom the United States government placed on a blacklist this week for human rights abuses, along with current and former Intelligence Ministry leaders and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Mr. Mortazavi, reputed to be involved in the persecution of journalists and political dissenters, was suspended along with two subordinates by Iran’s judiciary in August — a move that lawyers of the victims’ families hoped would pave the way for their prosecution.
In January, a parliamentary committee ruled that Mr. Mortazavi was the official responsible for the transfer of detainees to Kahrizak despite his being aware of the substandard conditions there.
After revelations that detainees had died during incarceration, Mr. Mortazavi was part of a cover-up that sought to claim that the deaths were a result of an outbreak of meningitis.
The publicized call from the victims’ families followed the mysterious deaths last week of two prominent physicians, both attacked while leaving their workplaces by gunmen riding motorcycles. The killings took place on two consecutive days, raising suspicions that they were politically motivated.
This week, the opposition Web site Jaras reported that one of the physicians, Dr. Abdolreza Sudbakhsh, an infectious diseases specialist, had been pressed by security officials to issue false diagnoses for Kahrizak detainees. Another physician connected with the Kahrizak case, Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani, also died under mysterious circumstances last November. Iranian officials ruled his death a suicide, but there has been speculation that he was poisoned.
Within days of the shootings, the Tehran police issued statements that the killings were “personally motivated” and that no evidence had been found to connect them.
But media reports and statements from student groups suggest that the police may be attempting a cover-up of serial killings reminiscent of the “chain murders” of the 1990s, in which at least 15 government critics and intellectuals were killed or disappeared, in what many believe to have been a purge by hard-liners of dissident figures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/middleeast/01iran.html?ref=global-home