Friday , 29 March 2024

Hidden Faces of Hostage-Taking: Ali Ghanaatkar, the Judiciary’s Man in Evin

Iranwire – Former hostages and political prisoners have accused Ali Ghanaatkar Mavardiani, an official formerly based at Evin Prison, of playing a key role in their detention. He was one of three Iranians named for their part in state-sponsored hostage-taking during a debate in the UK parliament on Wednesday.

Ali Ghanaatkar has been variously described as a judge at Branch 33 (Sub-Branch 1) of Evin Prison Court, also known as Tehran Prosecutor’s Office, as the prison’s head of interrogations, and as a bazpors: an official charged with helping prosecutors compile a criminal case against a given detainee. The following is an account of cases that Ghanaatkar is understood to have been involved in at Evin Prison, based on IranWire’s research.

Hostage-Taking of Dual Nationals

Ali Ghanaatkar was responsible for handling the initial stages of cases against dual national hostages in Iran, used as a pretext for their detention. This included British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ahead of her first trial in August 2016. He also reviewed the second case opened against Nazanin by the IRGC in October 2017, which led to the mother-of-one being sentenced to an additional year in prison, where she remains to this day.

Ghanaatkar was also involved in the case of Swedish-Iranian scientist Ahamdreza Jalali, who has been sentenced to death on fabricated spying charges. He is understood to have aided in the ongoing incarceration of French-Iranian academic Fariba Abdelkhah, and the activist and UK resident Aras Amiri. The wife of Kamil Ahmadi, a Kurdish researcher detained in Iran in August 2019, has also said Ghanaatkar blocked the family’s request to use their own choice of lawyer to defend him at Evin Prison Court.

Ghanaatkar was also assigned to “investigate” the case against Reza Eslami, an Iranian-Canadian associate professor at Shahid Beheshti University School of Law. In February this year Eslami was sentenced to seven years in prison and a travel ban in what Canadian officials believe is an attempt to use him as a political bargaining chip. 

The final judgement against Eslami was based on his having held “a five-day law training course in the Czech Republic”, for which he had received sponsorship from “an American NGO”. The Ministry of Intelligence accused Eslami of using the course to promote “overthrowing the regime”. Eslami denied any contact with government agencies.

When Eslami was first charged with espionage in August 2020, Ghanaatkar was named in Persian-language media as having been the “investigator” in the case. In the indictment issued from Tehran Prosecutor’s Office in Evin Prison, Ghanaatkar apparently relied on the verbatim text of the Ministry of Intelligence’s original report, without looking at any further evidence or hearing legal arguments.

“His Was the Only Face I Saw”

Lebanese-American citizen Nizar Zakka was held hostage in Evin Prison for four years before finally being released as part of a prisoner swap in June 2019. For the first nine months of his captivity in Iran, he said, Ali Ghanaatkar played the biggest role in keeping him at Evin – but also pressed him to obtain a huge ransom from “your American friends”.

Zakka was abducted by IRGC agents in September 2015 after visiting Tehran for an ICT conference, on the Iranian government’s invitation. He was held in solitary confinement and tortured while a fake espionage case was built against him by the judiciary.

Ali Ghanaatkar, Zakka told IranWire, was described in Evin as a bazpors: an official charged with helping prosecutors compile a criminal case against a given detainee. Ghanaatkar had an office inside the compound, Zakka said, and had been the one to rubber-stamp his being kept in custody after the usual three-day window for charges to be brought had expired.

Zakka said that as far as he knows, everyone on Ward 2A of Evin Prison – a ward for political prisoners run by the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization – at that time had their pre-trial cases handled by Ghanaatkar.

“Ali Ghanaatkar was very important for me,” Zakka said. “His was the only face I saw – I hadn’t even seen my interrogator’s – and he was the only person whose name you were allowed to know. I don’t know if he had the ability to release me or not, but he was the man who made the decision to keep me. He then prepared my file in such a way that it would be accepted by the court.”

From the first week of his arrest through to his first appearance in court in June 2016, Zakka was regularly taken to see Ghanaatkar. “The guy was very weird,” he said. “He used to try to send me books on Islam.

“He never accused me of anything. He always said that he understood. He’d ask me stupid things like ‘Do you like the Americans?’: nothing of value. He once told me: ‘You say you don’t like the IRGC’. I said, ‘Who cares? I came here [to Iran] give a presentation’. Our discussions never had any substance.

“He just played games. Because I thought I was talking to a human being, I told him that I was being tortured by my interrogators. He said ‘Well, you’ve been a bad student in class. It’s normal that this would happen to you.’

Zakka said he believed Ghanaatkar’s was to “legitimize” and dragging out sham cases against hostages and prisoners of conscience. Despite this, he said, initially Ghanaatkar implied that he might be released. Then everything changed.

One day, he said, “I said I was willing to post bail and stay in Iran until they finished their investigation. He told me: ‘We want two billion dollars.’ I was shocked. I thought he’d ask for a 5,000- or 10,000-dollar bail. I said, ‘What?’ and he said: ‘Ask your American friends to pay us two billion dollars.’”

It was only after his release that Zakka learned that same week, the US Supreme Court had ruled nearly $2bn in frozen Iranian assets could be given as compensation to victims of a 1983 bombing of a US military barracks in Lebanon. The attack had been carried out by Hezbollah, Tehran’s militant proxy in the region.

For Zakka, Ghanaatkar played a fundamental role in the hostage-taking chain. “He’s the judicial representative who extends your stay until you go to court. For me, for the first few months, he was the most significant person in their game. And he literally asked me for a ransom.”

Eight Years of “Service” at Evin Prison Court

Ghanaatkar is also accused of riding roughshod over the rights of Iranian prisoners of conscience, and of issuing baseless indictments against them from Branch 1 of Tehran Prosecutor’s Office, a “special court” based at Evin Prison.

Computer engineer Soheil Babadi was held for more than 200 days on Ward 2A of Evin Prison in 2012, based on 10 jokes he had posted on a satirical Facebook page. On arrival, he later wrote, he was beaten and interrogated for a full 24 hours before “someone named Ghanaatkar” read out a list of charges against him.

When he showed Ghanaatkar his bruises and said he had been tortured, Babadi said, the prison official responded: “I can’t see anything”. He then called the prison warden and told him: “This defendant is still unbalanced. He claims he’s been attacked.”

Ghanaatkar also oversaw the early cases against a number of activists, including Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, a sociologist and former Oxford University PhD student. In 2018 Jalaeipour was arrested and held in Evin without charge for 77 days. His father Hamidreza Jalaei, a reformist politician, told the media that Ghanaatkar had issued the arrest warrant for his son, then promptly gone on vacation for a week.

In March 2017 a then-professor at the Mahabad branch of Islamic Azad University, Amir Salimi Aghdam, was invited to Tehran to take part in a conference on extremism. But on touching down in the capital, he was arrested and transferred to Ward 209 of Evin Prison, run by the Ministry of Intelligence. At Branch 1 of Evin Prosecutor’s Office, Ali Ghanaatkar charged Aghdam with “collaborating with the hostile Saudi government”. He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison, reduced to five on appeal.

Three young social media activists, Mohammad Mohajer, Alireza Tavakoli and Mohammad Mehdi Zamanzadeh, were jailed in Iran for 12 years each in April 2017 over supposedly anti-regime content on Telegram channels they ran. After their arrests the previous autumn, Ali Ghanatkar had presided over their cases for six months before bringing the initial charges against them.

In March 2019 Masoud Kiani, a former dentistry student in Ukraine arrested at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport on returning home to Iran, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of “collaboration with the hostile government in Israel”. A source close to the case told HRANA Ghanaatkar had been in charge of Kiani’s case during his 80 days of solitary confinement and barred him from access to a chosen lawyer. He was charged at Evin, and his case handed over to the Revolutionary Court for sentencing.

In June 2020, Ghanaatkar issued a restraining order against Zatosht Ahmadi Ragheb, a civil activist living in Shahriar, Tehran province. In an interview with IranWire, the repeat prisoner of conscience said it related to his having held a placard in front of a Revolutionary Court building. Ghanaatkar, he said, had told him the step was “appropriate” – but also that “were he [Ghanaatkar] one of the people, he would understand the reason for our position”.

“Not the One Deciding”

Iranian poet and satirist Mohammadreza Aali Payam, known by his pen name “Halloo”, was arrested and held in Evin Prison from August to September 2012. In part of his diaries shared with IranWire, Payam wrote that he was interrogated by Ghanaatkar during his confinement. The official, he said, was most interested in the religious content of his poems.

One of Aali Payam’s poems was about the Twelfth Shiite Imam, also known as Imam Zaman, and described officials of the Islamic Republic waiting for his prophesied quasi-messianic return. “When you want to come,” it concluded, “please, brother, at least take off that green scarf.” The on-duty interrogator sympathized with the poem’s message and said he could well be released, Aali Payam wrote. But a few days later he was taken before Ghanaatkar, who told him: “I will cut your skin. Are you insulting Imam Zaman?”

Ghanaatkar also summoned Aali Payam after a poem he had written about his captivity,  Evin University, was published online. “Are you writing poetry in prison?” the official demanded to know. Later, after it was widely reported that Aali Payam was being kept in custody based on demands by his interrogators, Ghanaatkar told him: “You’ve criticized us as well.” In response, Aali Payam reminded him that he was still being held despite a judge having issued a bail bond, telling Ghanaatkar: “The obvious reason is you’re not the one deciding. You do what the ‘eternal master’ [Khamenei] wants.”

Eventually Ghanaatkar ordered Aali Payam’s release on a bail of 100 million tomans, up from the initially court-mandated 30 million. The satirist wrote of this last conversation: “I said, ‘Please thank my interrogator for this.’ He was bursting with anger.”

A Quiet Exit

It is not known whether Ghanaatkar still has any role in political detentions and hostage-taking in Iran. There is no mention of his past career in the Iranian state-controlled media output currently online. 

The last case at Evin Prison involving him came to light last December, when it emerged that Shaghayegh Zamanian, a young woman serving 10 years, had been transferred from Evin to the notorious Qarchak Prison in Varamin along with two other female “security” prisoners. Sources close to the case said she had first been charged by Ghanaatkar at Branch 1 of the Prosecutor’s Office with “espionage”, “propaganda against the regime” and “acting against national security”. They added that Zamanian had come down with symptoms of Covid-19 twice during her incarceration.

In February 2021, Iranian state-controlled media reported that Ali Ghanaatkar had been made the new head of the District 24 (Special Anti-Narcotics) Prosecutor’s Office.

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