November 22-2013
. . . beating report
Reza Heydarpour, the Evin prison physician who is said to have prepared a report indicating blogger Sattar Beheshti was beaten to death in custody, has been arrested, according to an exile website.
The website said Heydarpour was arrested November 4 by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence as he left Evin that day.
The website said the physician was put in Ward 209, the wing of the prison designated for political prisoners, and there has been no news of him since.
Sattar Beheshti was arrested in October 2012 by the cyber police and was pronounced dead in jail a few days later. There have been many reports that his death was the result of severe beatings and torture by his interrogators.
But the authorities said the coroner’s office concluded there was no conclusive evidence from the autopsy that his death resulted from beatings.
. . . keeps case alive
Dr. Heydarpour may have been arrested because he was suspected of leaking a medical document showing the opposite.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) earlier reported that Beheshti’s family told ICHRI it had learned of a “coroner’s report documenting his internal bleeding in the lungs, liver, kidney and the cerebellum while in custody.”
The head of cyber police in Tehran was removed after Beheshti’s death and the Beheshti family has since filed suit to bring his killers to justice.
Beheshti’s mother, Gohar Eshghi, whose refusal to stand mute has done much to keep the case in the public eye, has written President Rohani asking his assistance in bringing her son’s alleged murderer to justice. She claims Akbar Taghizadeh, a police officer currently in jail, is responsible for Beheshti’s death.
The physician’s arrest recalls the earlier case of Ramin Pourandarjani, the physician on duty at the Kahrizak detention center when three young men arrested in the 2009 post-election protest died. Pourandarjani died mysteriously a few months later.
