“I didn’t know he’d been arrested the day before,” Ms Parvaz, now 67 and based in Britain, told The i Paper. “He couldn’t take the torture, and named me. I was arrested.”
“The regime introduced misogynistic laws,” she said. “They said women had to cover their heads. Women did not have the right to divorce. Women had to have their husband’s permission to leave the country. Custody of children was the husband’s right. The law permitted men to kill their daughters and wives, and they went free.”
Evin prison on the outskirts of Tehran by the lower slopes of the Alborz Mountains (Photo by: Chris Bradley/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
She was transferred to Evin Prison in Tehran, a notorious site holding thousands of prisoners, including hundreds of political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and dual nationals. The prison, sitting on a hilltop surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences, would become her home for most of the next seven years.
Ms Parvaz was shown to a room meant to sleep five prisoners; instead, it housed 80 women and two children.
A prisoner in the Evin prison yard in Tehran in 2022 (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA)She remembers becoming very ill in Evin with an unbearable pain in her stomach.
square NEWS Life inside Iran's prisons: 'They beat me with chairs and tortured my brother in front of me'
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One of her fellow prisoners was a doctor and treated her with small drops of honey water. “I stayed alive,” she said. “I was scared, but I never let them see my feelings. I had a strong face.”
“Every day, they were pressuring us to repent and say we were wrong,” she said, remembering the time of the massacre. “They took 50 prisoners from the wing I was in — they never came back.”
Two years after the massacres, Ms Parvaz was finally released from Evin, in the autumn of 1990.
The attacks on Iran over the last two weeks have left Ms Parvaz more fearful than ever about the safety of prisoners in Evin and the rest of Iran.
This week, during its strike campaign on Iran, Israel struck Evin, damaging parts of the facility, prompting criticism for endangering the lives of the prisoners held there. According to Iran’s health ministry, about 600 Iranians have been killed in Israeli strikes this week, although one US-based human right group said the real toll was closer to 1,000.
The entrance of Evin prison in Tehran (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA)In the past 10 days, at least six men have been executed on charges of espionage for Israel, with reports of at least nine others having been executed in prisons across Iran. Today Iran announced that three men had been hanged, charged with bringing “assassination equipment” into the country. At least six other defendants are on death row for charges of espionage for Israel and at risk of execution, according to the Iran Human Rights non-profit group. At least 223 people have been arrested since the start of the conflict between Israel and Iran.
“If the regime harms prisoners – those arrested now or who have been in prison — their blood will be on both the Iranian and Israeli regimes.”
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Read MoreThe women’s rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, who was held in the prison until being allowed temporary leave for medical reasons last year, declared: “Prisoners remain inside the wards under heightened security conditions or are being transferred. Injured prisoners have no place for transfer or treatment and are not being moved to hospitals outside the prison due to the war-like conditions. Some prisoners have not yet spoken with their families. When prisoners are transferred under these conditions, we will not have precise information about them.”
“I think Iran is clearing space for a massive crackdown in society,” he said, speaking of the prisoner transfers from Evin. “Now there is a ceasefire in place, Iran is going to start engaging in further state repression, using the argument that there’s a national security crisis — that the country is filled with Israeli spies. It’s going to try and arrest anyone it can to tighten control over society.”
However, Ms Parvaz emphasised that overthrowing the regime must come from the Iranian people themselves, not Israeli or American bombs.
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