Tehran, August 11: As dispute swirls around events at a notorious prison used to incarcerate political opponents after the June 12 election, a leading reformist candidate in the vote said some inmates, both male and female, had been raped, according to news reports.
The accusation was made after the Kahrizak detention center in Tehran was ordered closed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Its director was held. The police chief, Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam, said on Sunday that the prison “was only built for thugs and gangsters. Election protesters should not have been transferred there,” he said, according to state-run Press TV.
But he denied that the death of two people there was the result of mistreatment by guards, insisting that they had been killed by a “deadly virus infection,” Press TV said.
The opposition has said that at least three protesters died in Kahrizak, including Mohsen Ruholamini, a senior aide to Mohsen Rezai, a losing candidate in the June election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power with a landslide victory.
On Sunday, Mehdi Karroubi, another of the defeated candidates, said on his website that some detainees had been raped. Karroubi said senior officials told him that “really shameful issues” had arisen in the detention of opponents.
“Some young male detainees were raped,” the letter was quoted as saying, while “some young female detainees were raped in a way that have caused serious injuries.” There was no immediate official response to the accusation.
The website said the letter was sent to a former president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s richest men and a powerful adversary of Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani also heads an influential state arbitration panel called the Expediency Council.
-Agencies