Journalist and activist Fatemeh Kheradmand was sent to Evin Prison, where she was harshly treated and forbidden from seeing her young child. Her husband was also incarcerated for journalism. When she was released on bail, she fled the country with her family.
Name: Fatemeh Kheradmand
Career: Worked with Hamshahri group of publications, Etemad newspaper, Salamat and Alef magazines, and news websites Kaleme and Ghalam-e Sabz.
Charges: Propaganda against the regime.
Fatemeh Kheradmand is a communications professional who worked on Mir Hossein Mousavi ‘s presidential campaign as part of a group of students. Kheradmand and her husband Masoud Lavasani were active in the protests that followed the disputed 2009 presidential election, which led to their arrests.
Kheradmand spent the two years that her husband was in prison writing for Hamshahri newspaper, supporting and talking to other families of political prisoners and taking care of her sick baby. After her husband was released, security forces instructed Hamshahri to dismiss her from her job. She then became a freelance writer who reported on health issues. She was arrested again after she began writing for online magazine Ghalam-e Sabz (Green Pen).
Kheradmand reported on conditions for political prisoners and leaders of the Green Movement, urban problems that arose after the 2009 presidential election and the fallout from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term. Intelligence Ministry agents arrested her at midnight on January 8, 2012 when she was coming back from a party.
“My son had fallen sleep in the car,” she says of her ordeal. The moment I opened the door 10 or 12 people pushed their way into the house. They spent about three hours turning the house upside down searching for the documents they wanted. They examined photos and confiscated family albums as evidence. Throughout this whole time my son was still in the car and freezing but given he had already witnessed the horrendous arrest of his father, I didn’t want him to see another.” Agents took Kheradmand to Evin Prison and d put her in solitary confinement in Cell Block 209.
“That first night I was threatened a lot and wasn’t allowed to sleep until the following day,” she says.”I was accused of communicating with the outside world and working with anti-regime groups which, if true, would have led to my execution. They threatened to arrest my husband, thereby leaving my child parentless. Then for days and days they would leave me to rot in my cell.”
The first time Kheradmand was allowed to contact the outside world was a week after her arrest. There was a 10-day period where she wasn’t able to talk to anyone. She was forbidden from seeing her son and was only allowed to do so three days before her release. Eventually, on February 1, 2012 she was released on bail and tried at the Revolutionary Court, where she was sentenced to one year in prison. A year later the appellate court upheld the sentence.
She and her husband continued their journalistic activities and were consequently detained and interrogated numerous times. Her sentence was due to start in October 2013 but Kheradmand fled the country before she was summoned.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
Please contact info@iranwire.com with comments, updates or further information about cases.
Read other cases in the series:
Interested in writing for IranWire?
Share your stories.
comments