Iran: 28 years for Belgian aid worker. The Family: “Unspeakable Tortures”
from Monica Fabbri
December 14, 2022
In handcuffs for sending pictures and videos don protests on social media and on Persian-language dissident TVs abroad. With this accusation, Revolutionary Guards disclose that they have arrested members of the Western media. Thus Iran enters the “blacklist” of the countries with the most journalists in prison. Also today news is given of the 28-year sentence of the Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele. He was arrested in February for no specific reason and has been in solitary confinement ever since. The family – devastated – denounced “months of unspeakable psychological torture”. If a solution is not found, Olivier will remain in prison until 2050; he will be almost 70 years old.
And it doesn’t end there. After two public executions, 12 more people were sentenced to death: among them the 24-year-old Kurdish rapper Saman Seydi Yasin. According to Amnesty International, three minors are also at risk of hanging. The world is indignant and the foreign minister Antonio Tajani he calls on “the Tehran authorities to back down and prevents further death sentences” for those who “participated in demonstrations calling for freedom”. In the meantime, Tehran has suspended the execution of the 23-year-old Mahan Sadrat Marni, pending further review of the case by Iran’s supreme court. Sadrat, who did not have access to a lawyer, was tried on November 3. However, arrests and sentences do not stop the protests, the most extensive since the 1979 Revolution, which transformed Iran into an Islamic republic.
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