The student tortured for defying the censors

Foad Sojoodi Farimani knew he had to make a split-second decision. He had set out on foot from the campus of Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, where he was studying for a PhD in biomechanical engineering and working as a research assistant on medical robotics, and he needed to collect a prototype from another research centre. Then he heard a man call out his name.

He turned and saw a low ranking member of the Bassij paramilitary force.

“If they arrest me now, who knows where I will end up,” he thought. “But if I can make it onto the campus, at least they will have to arrest me legally.”

He made a run for the university entrance, but was tripped by a second Bassij member and one jumped on him while the other hit him on the head with a gun.

With no warrant, they blindfolded him, forced him into a car and pushed his head down between his legs, so he could not see where he was going.

It was a journey into the unknown, a period of confinement and torture that would bring him to attempt suicide several times.

Looking back now, as a visiting researcher in the mechanical engineering faculty at the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, he knows he is lucky to be alive.

Challenging politicians

Sojoodi, then 28, was working on a project to create a surgical robot. Before the events of 2009 he had been an activist and published and re-posted stories on his blog, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader.

In his own posts he criticised politicians for hiding behind religion and challenged the notion that the Supreme Leader is God’s agent and that his words are those of God.

In a bid to combat pervasive censorship of information, he tried to set up an online library where people could access books about politics, religion, science and history.

“We don’t have human sciences in Iran like in the West. We couldn’t even have book clubs, theatre groups and mountain climbing clubs, or anything where friends could meet and talk about things,” Sojoodi said. “Under [former president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad they were all closed.”

The Bassiji took Sojoodi to Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. His laptop and clothes were taken away and he was put in solitary confinement in ward 2-A, run by the intelligence division of the Revolutionary Guard. It was a stifling cell with a concrete floor and just two pipes in the wall for ventilation.

Accusations and beatings

He was taken blindfolded to be questioned by interrogators. Sometimes they talked to him, sometimes they asked written questions.

On the top of each piece of paper was imprinted “Truth will set you free”. But if they did not like the answers they would tear up the paper, beat him, send him to solitary confinement, prevent him from going outside to get fresh air and stop him from calling his family as punishment.

At first Sojoodi’s captors wanted him to confess to political crimes, such as being a member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq – the left-wing Muslim revolutionary movement that supported the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 but had since become an opposition group in exile and is listed as a terrorist organisation by the Iranian government.

They threatened to torture his mother if he did not comply. But Sojoodi is a liberal atheist whose father was assassinated by Mojahedin.

After some days of questioning they tried another tack, accusing him of religious crimes, such as insulting ‘divine principles’, or insulting Islam and the Prophet. They read an email he had sent a friend in which he mentioned that some schizophrenics claimed they were prophets, and tried to beat a confession out of him.

Later they tried to force him to confess to setting a bank on fire. But he wasn’t even in Tehran on the day the alleged offence took place and had the flight tickets to prove it.

During 105 days in prison he was questioned for about 60 days, sometimes two or three times a day and sometimes at night.

Psychological torture the worst

For Sojoodi the psychological torture was worse than the physical beatings. At least with the beatings it made him feel tired and more able to fall asleep.

But the psychological torture played on his mind. He felt humiliated and abused. For example, his captors trawled through his emails and tried to force him to confess to sexual relations with his female students.

“I felt the sexual humiliation and violation of my privacy was one of the worst things they could do,” he said. "It made me feel ashamed, disgusted about myself.”

The beatings damaged his eardrum and it became infected.

As the interrogations wore on Sojoodi gradually lost hope and several times tried to take his own life. At one point he collected freezer bags and tied them together to make rope to hang himself, but it did not work. Another time he tried to cut himself with broken piping. But it was not sharp enough.

On one occasion later, the guards told him to write a last will, handcuffed him, tied something around his neck and started pulling. Sojoodi felt relieved that at last he would have a chance to die. But the guards sensed his lack of resistance and let go.

Released at last

Eventually Sojoodi was released pending trial, but only because he could put up a surety of 500 million Tomans (about US$500,000 in 2010), a sum so high that few can afford it. He was lucky to be able to put his uncle’s house deeds up for surety and was released on 19 December 2010.

When the trial was held in May 2011, Sojoodi was questioned over an article about Mohammad cartoons that he had downloaded but not reposted or sent to anyone.

The prosecutor asked for him to be executed. The judge sentenced him to eight years in prison, five for insulting Islam and the Prophet and God, two for “acting against national security” and one for “insulting [former supreme leaders] Khomeini and Khamenei”. He also received 100 lashes for insulting Ahmadinejad.

He appealed against the decision but was never told of the verdict. Then in November 2011 his uncle was ordered to turn him in. At that point Sojoodi knew his only hope was to flee the country and lose the bail money. He slipped over the border into Turkey.

Sojoodi left behind his family, who faced severe intimidation afterwards, and a debt he will have to work at least 10 years to pay off. But he regards himself as one of the lucky ones because the authorities forgot to block his passport and he got out.

He was able to continue in academia thanks to support from the United States-based Scholars at Risk network, which helped him find his job as a researcher.

The context

According to Education under Attack 2014, published by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, cases of prolonged detention without charge, arbitrary arrest and sentencing of students and teachers for political reasons continued to be recorded in Iran after the post-electoral conflict of 2009.

In the three years from March 2009, the human rights commission of the Iranian student association Daftar Tahkim Vahdat identified instances of 436 arrests, 254 convictions and 364 cases of denial of education, referring to the system of punishing student activists by banning them from university.

As of April 2012, some 31 students were still being held in prison.

One of the most high profile cases was that of Omid Kokabee, a PhD student at the University of Texas, who was arrested while visiting his family in Iran in 2011 and was held for 15 months before being given a verdict in a rushed trial in which no evidence was presented, according to his lawyer.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for national security offences after refusing to cooperate on scientific projects in Iran, his lawyer said.

Sojoodi is not sure how the situation will change for students under the new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who has the support of reformists.

But he believes that if the pattern of censorship, unfair imprisonment and torture continues, there are two ways the international community can apply pressure for change.

“First we need smart sanctions,” he said. “Every government needs money and this one gets it from oil and gas. If the international community stopped buying oil like it did to prevent the development of the nuclear bomb, it would force the government to talk.

“The international community must understand that human rights and nuclear issues are two sides of a same coin and they can’t solve one without the other.

“Second we need as much access to satellite programming and anti-censorship software as possible, and find ways to help people talk to each other and to people outside of the country.”

For now Sojoodi’s and his family’s future remains uncertain. His is currently applying for asylum in The Netherlands.

* Brendan O’Malley was the lead researcher on Education under Attack 2014 (Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack), published on 27 February 2014.