Drs. Kamiar and Arash Alaei were arrested in June 2008 on charges of “communicating with an enemy government,” i.e. the US, and “seeking to overthrow the Iranian government.”
Kamiar, 37, was sentenced to three years, but released last October, after completing about two-thirds of his sentence. Arash, 42, was given a six-year sentence in Evin Prison and freed Monday after serving just over half his sentence.
Arash’s release was announced by his brother, Kamiar, in emails and a Facebook posting.
It wasn’t immediately known if Arash would be allowed to leave Iran. Arash is now a student in New York working on a doctorate in public health at the University of Albany.
Kamiar said his brother was released under a pardon given by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi to 100 political prisoners.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) believes the brothers were arrested because of their work on HIV, which included talks abroad, community education, social support and treatment for HIV-positive patients. PHR, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using medicine and science to stop human rights violations, organized a letter campaign across 80 nations, along with Amnesty International, pushing for the brothers’ release.
“The appeal has been to allow the brothers to do their work,” said Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of PHR. “This is not a political campaign. This is a campaign by colleagues, many of whom know the brothers and their work directly because they have worked in concert with them or been inspired by their pioneering efforts inside Iran.”
The brothers were not politically active in Iran. They began treating HIV-positive patients in Iran in the late 1990s and soon developed an effective program for AIDS care in a Kermanshah prison, their hometown. The Alaeis’ three-pronged approach of integrated prevention, care and social support has since become a model program in the Middle East.
“It was beyond borders really and the program became part of the national strategic plan,” Kamiar told BBC World Service. “When it was part of a national strategy, all we did was part of the strategy and we never went into politics or other [things].”
The brothers’ arrests stymied US efforts to engage Iran through nonpolitical exchanges, which may have been a goal of the arrests. One of the first US-funded exchanges brought Iranian physicians to tour Boston medical facilities and included the Alaeis as participants. That may have been the reason the Alaeis were targeted.
The two brothers were arrested by five secret policemen in plain clothes and unmarked cars a day apart in late June 2008 at their parents’ home in Kermanshah. Kamiar Alaei had completed one year of his doctoral studies at the University of Albany and was on a summer visit to Iran when he was detained.
He says the prison experience scarred him. His readjustment has been fraught with fear and flashbacks. “I struggle every day,” he told the Albany Times Union last June. “When I sleep, I go back to prison in my mind.”
He says he was never tortured, but for the first couple of months was kept in solitary confinement in a 4-foot-by-6-foot cell with only a thin mat on a concrete floor. There was nothing else in the windowless cell. He was not allowed outside to exercise, was not given any reading material, and letters sent to him by his family and supporters were never delivered.
He said he kept himself sane by praying frequently, doing meditation exercises and playing a mental poetry game.
His father, Shaban, 75, a retired university professor of Persian literature, taught him to memorize a wide variety of poems when he was a boy. Alone in his cell, Alaei would recite a poem and whatever letter the poem ended on, he had to begin a new poem with that same letter. He mixed remembered poems with his own creations. The game, which he remembered fondly from childhood, turned into a long, unbroken chain of verse that occupied his time and kept his mind sharp.
Alaei’s mother, Shahdokt, kept tearful vigils outside the prison walls, even though she was not allowed to visit her sons.
When he was allowed out of solitary confinement at Evin, he was moved to a communal cell for 30 men that measured about 20-feet-by-20-feet. The inmates included hardened criminals and violent drug dealers.
Ironically, the Alaei brothers helped create compassionate prison programs in Iran to treat HIV-positive inmates. “I visited many prisons as a doctor to help the prisoners and now I was a prisoner myself. It made no sense,” he said.
After eight months, he was transferred to the main prison unit. He saw his brother there, but guards never let them stay together for any extended periods. He also spoke briefly with Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American freelance journalist released in May 2009 after being detained for three months.
The brothers had run AIDS clinics in Iran for years with the government’s blessing and even some financial support.
