September 3, 2021
A hacker group has sent The Associated Press a large volume of videos it says were stolen from Evin Prison’s security system, some of it showing mistreatment of prisoners.
But more remarkable than the hack was the announcement by the head of the Prisons Organization that the videos were from Evin and his public apology for the treatment of the prisoners
One video shows the security room at the prison the moment the hacker group announced its presence. “Cyberattack,” the bank of television monitors flashes. Guards gather around, holding up their mobile phones and filming, or making urgent calls. ”General protest until the freedom of political prisoners” reads another line on the screens.
An online account, by an entity describing itself as a group of hackers, shared footage of the incident, as well as parts of other surveillance videos it seized, with The Associated Press and some other news outlets outside Iran. The hackers said the release of the footage was an effort to publicize grim conditions at the prison.
In one part, a man smashes a bathroom mirror to try to cut open his arm. Prisoners — and even guards — beat each other in scenes captured by surveillance cameras. Inmates sleeping in small rooms, with bunk beds stacked three high against the walls, wrap themselves in blankets to stay warm in the winter.
Iranian state media did not acknowledge the videos until after Mohammad-Mehdi Haj-mohammadi, the head of the national prison system, publicly said the videos were real. He also took responsibility for the “unacceptable behavior” shown in the videos and promised change, sounding as if he had not known what some people were doing under him.
Heba Morayef, Middle East regional director for Amnesty International, scoffed at that, saying, “Torture and other ill-treatment are far too widespread and systematic in Iran’s prisons and detention centers to be presented as the work of a few ‘bad apples’.”
Much of the footage bears time stamps from 2020 and this year. Several videos without the stamp show guards wearing facemasks, indicating they came amid the coronavirus pandemic that started in February 2020 in Iran.
There is no sound in the videos. One sequence shows what appears to be an emaciated man dumped from a car in the parking lot, then dragged through the prison, not carried on a stretcher or wheeled gurney. Another shows a cleric walking down the stairs and passing by the man, without stopping.
Guards in another video are seen beating a man in a prisoner’s uniform. One guard sucker-punches a prisoner in a holding cell. Guards also fight among themselves, as do the prisoners.
The account that shared the videos with the AP called itself “The Justice of Ali.” It claimed to have “hundreds” of gigabytes of data from what it described as a hack conducted several months ago.
The AP said the control room system seen in the video appeared to be running Windows 7, for which Microsoft no longer provides patches. That would make it easier for a potential hacker to target.
While in theory under the control of Iran’s prison system, Evin also has wards reserved for political prisoners that are run by the Pasdaran.
Reports by UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman have repeatedly cited Evin prison as a site of abuses of prisoners. Rehman warned in January that Iran’s entire prison system faced “long-standing overcrowding and hygiene deficiencies” and “insurmountable obstacles for responding to COVID-19.”