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Iranwire -The former head of Tehran’s Evin prison has spoken about the cruel treatment inflicted to women inmates in the 1980s, including rape, as a means to prevent them from attaining paradise.
Addressing an event held this week on the Clubhouse online platform, Hussein Mortazavi Zanjani, who served in the notorious prison between 1987-88, said that virgin female prisoners were coerced to marry guards before their execution.
According to ex-political prisoners, this inhuman practice was based on the belief that women and girls dying as virgins would go straight to paradise.
Mortazavi quoted the father of one of the executed women prisoners as telling him after her execution: “What deeply pains and angers me in life is not the killing of my daughter but that they brought money and claimed it was for a marriage sanctioned by Sharia law. This act was more devastating and horrifying to me than the loss of my child.”
The ex-official also said that the current president of the Islamic Republic, Ebrahim Raisi, had a direct role in the execution of political prisoners, which were carried out based on a fatwa by Iran’s then supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini. Raisi was at the time the deputy prosecutor of Tehran.
Mortazavi’s comments ignited a firestorm of reactions, with some former prisoners saying that he did not provide any new and substantial information regarding the mass executions.
