Concerns about the status of student activist under torture in Evin prison

Iran Press News: Advaar News, the news source from the office of Fostering Unity (Tahkim Vahdat)* reported: Saeed-Kheirollah Derakhshandi’s father expressed serious concern for his son who has been in what the regime calls temporary detention for more than 75 days; Mr. Derakhshandi said that he was troubled over the way his son’s case was being handled by the Islamic judiciary.

Mojtataba Derakhshandi announced that Dr. Mohammad-Ali Dadkhah, the esteemed students’ defense attorney, as well as defense attorney for many political prisoners had accepted his son’s case and said: “When we went to the prosecutor’s office to obtain information in my son’s case and asked for the classified case number so that we could tend to related issues, the judiciary authorities told us that that there was no case file under my son’s name in their office!”

It is worth mentioning that Saeed Derakhshandi and Pouya Jahandari, two of the former student activists who were arrested by agents of the ministry of intelligence and information (MOIS), in August have been detained in the public section of the MOIS-supervised ward 209 of Evin prison.

* The Office of Fostering Unity, known in Farsi as Tahkim Vahdat, is the largest student organization in Iran. It was formed to support the rule of Ruhollah Khomeini. Over the years Tahkim Vahdat became one of the most vocal critics of hardliners in Iran and during the Khatami presidency promoted a pro-reformist stance. Since the failure of the so-called reformists, at present the organization works to promote secularism, though many of its governing members are "nationalist religionists", meaning that they believe in the separation of religion and state though they remain faithful to Islam as their religion.