As demonstrators take advantage of the annual al-Quds Day rally in Tehran today to protest against Ahmedinejad and demand the release of political prisoners, Martin Fletcher files another report [previous here] on the kind of punishment their comrades are suffering in the Islamic Republic:
On July 8, a young student was arrested in Tehran for protesting against President Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election. The security forces clubbed Amir Javadifar, 24, so badly that he was treated in hospital before being taken to the notorious Evin prison. His father was later called and told to collect his corpse.
The security forces ordered his family to say that he had died of a pre-existing condition but medical reports show that he had been beaten, sustaining several broken bones, and had his toenails pulled out. “My son was not involved in politics. He loved his motherland — that’s all,” said Javadifar’s recently widowed father. “I alone mourn him.”
Javadifar is just one among scores of alleged cases of murder, torture and rape unearthed by opposition investigators — cases that a regime claiming to champion Islamic values is doing its utmost to suppress by denouncing the charges as lies, arresting the investigators and seizing their files. The Times has been given access to 500 pages of documents — a small fraction of the total — that include handwritten testimony by victims, medical reports and interviews.
They suggest that security forces have engaged in systematic killing and torture to try to break the opposition.
“The use of rape and torture was similar across prisons in Tehran and the provinces. It is difficult not to conclude that the highest authorities planned and ordered these actions. Local authorities would not dare take such actions without word from above,” wrote one investigator, in a coded reference to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.
A 12-year-old as a threat to the government? Oh yes:
Ali Reza Tavasoli, 12, became separated from his father at a demonstration in the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran commemorating the murder of Neda Soltan, the young woman whose videotaped death made her an opposition icon. His family stated that he had been killed in a car accident, but two doctors and a police officer have since testified that he died from blows to the head and that Basijis removed his body from the hospital.
His aunt says his impoverished parents were given the equivalent of $2,000 (£1,215) to lie about the boy’s death.
Mick Hartley 
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