Samnak Aghaei ‎

Kurdish blogs have published various reports and news stories about the recent torture and death ‎of a Kurdish dissident while in custody at a Islamic Republic detention facility in Kermanshah. ‎The victim is said to have been a member of Kurdish party opposed to the Islamic Republic. ‎

According to local sources, Farzad Ghobadi, a member of the Kurdish party Pezhak, was injured ‎by the Revolutionary Guards while performing an operation along with fellow party members. ‎Ghobadi was able to flee the scene. ‎

He then found refuge in the home of a relative, Ahmad Javaheri, a civil society activist in ‎Kermanshah. Soon after, however, both Ghobadi and Javaheri were arrested in a raid and ‎transported to a ministry of intelligence detention facility in Kermanshah. Ghobadi was ‎murdered only a day after his arrest. Ghobadi's sister, Rabe'eh Ghobadi, who was arrested hours ‎after his brother and was transported to the same detention facility, claims that his brother was ‎shot to death in front of her eyes. ‎

The political news website "Rozheheh Lat" has published more details about this event. The ‎website reports, "after murdering Farzad Ghobadi, in a bid to instill more fear and terror and to ‎suppress the dissemination of this information, security officers proceeded to arrest the victim's ‎brother, Faroogh Ghobadi on 19/10/1386 [January 9, 2008], and arrested the victim's older ‎brother, Ata Ghobadi, as well on the same night." ‎

The report continues, "while torturing the aforementioned individuals at the intelligence ‎ministry's facility, security officers unveiled Farzad Ghobadi's corpse to terrorize them further. ‎Other people that were forced to look at Farzad Ghobadi's corpse are Fatemeh Javaheri and ‎Rabe'eh Ghobadi. The victim's sister, Rabe'eh Ghobadi is currently suffering from sever mental ‎trauma and has lost her memory and concentration. It is reported that Farzad's sister claims to ‎have witnessed her brother's murder with her eyes." ‎

The website reports that Kaveh Javaheri, the 12-year-old son of the Javaheri family, is missing: ‎‎"during the raid of Ahmad Javaheri's home, the 12-year-old child Kaveh Javaheri fled the house ‎in fear and no information about his whereabouts is available at this point. Meanwhile, the two-‎year-old child of this family was separated from the parents and transported to a hospital. On ‎‎01/11/1386 [January 21, 2008] the ministry of intelligence proceeded to arrest human rights ‎activist Khaled Ghobadi (who was recently released after 8 months in prison). In the latest ‎development, security officers raided the house of Khaled Ameri, the victim's uncle, and arrested ‎him along with his daughter, Sarveh Ameri, a political science student at the University of ‎Kermanshah. They then forced these individuals to view the unburied and tortured body of ‎Farzad Ghobadi and move Sarveh Ghobadi to Rabe'eh Ghobadi's cell so that she can witness the ‎condition of her torture and mentally unstable aunt. ‎

Various other reports about the repercussions of such actions and the murder of another Kurdish ‎prisoner, Ebrahim Lotfollahi, point to the instability in both provinces of Kurdistan and ‎Kermanshah. Conditions are particularly instable in the cities of Kamyaran, Sanandaj, Ravansar, ‎Dehgalan, and Kermanshah, where police and security officers are on standby and prepared to ‎impose order in case of an emergency. ‎