The Musavis as well as Mehdi Karrubi and his wife were put under house arrest shortly before the February 14 protest demonstrations. No one has reported being able to speak with them or visit with them since then.
Late last month, news reports on opposition websites spoke of the two couples being removed from their homes and taken to an unknown detention site—though the kaleme website associated with Musavi named Heshmatiyeh prison as their detention site.
The main evidence of their removal was the fact that no government guards were any longer posted outside their homes to prevent people from entering their residences. Sahamnews website, associated with Karrubi, quoted one of his children as saying a neighbor had reported seeing Karrubi and his wife being taken from their home.
The Judiciary, however, repeatedly denied that the four had been removed from their homes. Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said the same thing. That prompted Mohammad-Taghi Karrubi, the couple’s son, to write an open letter to Salehi calling him a “liar.”
Last Thursday, the kaleme website posted an open letter from the Musavis’ daughters saying they had been told by Judiciary officials that they could visited their parents. They wrote that they went to the house “and from the iron gate installed at the entrance to the alley to their home we were stopped by the security men and told, ‘You can’t go in; the news [that you can visit] is wrong.’”
That was cited as further proof the two opposition leaders were locked away somewhere. But the daughters had referred to guards at the Musavi home while others had been saying for several days that the guards had been removed.
Finally, on Tuesday, 10 days after the first reports of their removal, kaleme issued an apology and said the Musavis had been confined at home all along.
“In recent days, it has become evident to kaleme.com that Mrs. Rahnavard and Mr. Musavi are under house arrest; the news of their transfer from their home to a detention center needs to be corrected. We apologize to our readers.”
There was no news from the Karrubi home as to whether that couple was in their home.
Both couples are still being held incommunicado. No one is known to have spoken with them in more than three weeks. Email and phone links—including cellphones—have been severed.
The Judiciary, under pressure to say how many protestors were arrested at the last big demonstration February 14, is still refusing to say. Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi last week responded to reporters’ inquiries saying, “The numbers keep on changing. Frankly speaking, announcing statistics is not within the duties of the Judiciary. It is the duty of the police. But we believe such figures should not be announced because they could be used as a pretext by some quarters.”
He said the numbers might be used by the opposition as evidence of their success. That, of course, could only be done if the number was very high. The opposition has been saying the number arrested was about 1,500. The government has not said that number is too high. It has simply ignored it.
Dolatabadi said there were no arrests March 1, when the police smothered a planned protest with masses of officers in the streets. The officers often far outnumbered the protesters, several eyewitnesses said. The sahamnews website said it knew of 79 people arrested that day and that more may have been arrested. The police have already acknowledged that they briefly arrested Faezeh Rafsanjani, the daughter of the former president, on the day Dolatabadi said no one was arrested.