80-year-old grandfather of student activist Arash Sadeghi arrested

This article was last updated on May 21, 2022

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The ailing grandfather of imprisoned student activist Arash Sadeghi has been detained.

According to opposition website Kaleme, Shirollah Dargahi, the 80-year-old grandfather of jailed student leader Arash Sadeghi, was arrested on Wednesday night and taken to an unknown location for “questioning.”

In early May, media outlets affiliated with the opposition Green Movement published a letter written by Dargahi to his grandson’s interrogators in which he accused them of lacking any conscience.

A graduate student of Philosophy at Allameh Tabatabaee University, Arash Sadeghi was barred from education in 2009. During the widely contested presidential elections that year, he was a member of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign team. Following the elections, he was arrested a number of times, and was finally sentenced by the Revolutionary Courts to 74 lashes, a one-year prison sentence plus a four-year suspended term.

While Sadeghi was on prison leave in November 2010, his mother suffered a heart attack after intelligence agents stormed into her home in search of the young activist. She later died in hospital.

Sadeghi is currently being held at Evin Prison’s ward 350. He recently began a hunger strike in solidarity with jailed blogger and human rights activist Hossein Ronaghi Maleki.

Two weeks ago, Ronaghi Maleki announced that he was going on hunger strike to protest the authorities’ repeated denial of medical furlough. He has also reportedly called on Arash Sadeghi to end his strike.

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