Kurdistan Authorities Push to Execute Two Kurdish Political Prisoners

The Kurdistan Province judicial and security officials have launched an effort in recent days to enforce the confirmed death sentences of two Kurdish prisoners of conscience, Zanyar and Loghman Moradi, who are currently inside Rajaee Shahr Prison in Karaj, a source told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. According to the source, the Marivan Friday Imam who is the plaintiff in the case of the two prisoners, along with Kurdistan Province judicial officials, have pursued the executions all along and the new efforts have created concern among the two prisoners’ families about the imminent enforcement of the death sentences.

Loghman and Zanyar Moradi were accused of “involvement in the murder of the Marivan Friday Imam’s son” and “moharebeh (enmity with God),” charges they never accepted, calling the case a scenario fabricated by the Intelligence Ministry. Last year, the two men published a letter describing the severe psychological and physical torture they had endured, during which they had made false confessions. Security forces arrested Zanyar Moradi, 23, and Loghman Moradi, 25, on August 2, 2009, for the July 2009 murder of the son of the Marivan Friday Imam. They spent nine months inside the Sanandaj Intelligence Office Detention Center, under severe physical and psychological pressure to confess. Approximately six months later, the two prisoners were transferred to the Sanandaj Central Prison and then to Evin Prison’s Intelligence Ministry Ward 209.

Furthermore, a source in Marivan told the Campaign that some time after the murder of the Friday Imam’s son and his companions, several high-ranking Marivan IRGC members involved in the murders of dozens of Kurdish citizens were arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Unit. It was revealed later that this group of IRGC members had been involved in murdering Kurdistan civilians, putting military clothes on their bodies, and presenting them as members of PJAK, the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, claiming cash rewards from the IRGC for each murdered “PJAK member.” Even at that time, locals attributed the murder of the Friday Imam’s son to this group. According to various reports, the group’s leader, Hiva Tab, a former IRGC Commander in Kurdistan, was secretly executed in Kurdistan a few weeks ago. Reporting on the execution, Tadbir News Agency revealed the intelligence group’s potential involvement in the 2009 murder of the Marivan Friday Imam’s son.

Three years after their arrest, in a letter the Campaign obtained a copy of last year, the two men spoke of three years of torture and their long wait for the truth to emerge in their cases. “Our expectations remain unaddressed after many pieces of correspondence and our requests of judicial authorities for a re-trial. We do not expect the trial and punishment of those who tortured us and treated us inhumanely and immorally. But we still expect the Marivan Friday Imam to act honestly and courageously, as is expected of his religious position, and as he repeatedly promised….The Friday Imam could have … taken a long step toward our release by admitting that we are innocent and that he has no grievances against us,” they said in the letter.