Profile Of A Prisoner

Tehran Bureau:

Fariba, a twenty-nine year old journalist who may have voted for Mir Hossein Mousavi, was arrested on August 22, the first day of Ramadan near Iftar time at her father's home. According to her father, Reza Pajooh, a former officer in the Air Force, she spent the entire month of Ramadan in solitary confinement. [...] Her parents, who had only heard rumors of her hunger strike, were allowed to pay her a visit at Evin. According to their account, her mental and physical state was very troubling. They had previously declared that she had been subjected to severe mental and physical pressure to make confessions.

Her father claims that on the occasion of his previous visit to see his daughter in jail she had been so angry that she made a scene yelling about the way her prison guard and interrogators were treating her. She had submitted to a very 'vulgar' body search that had apparently traumatized her and complained of her interrogators accusing her of moral misconduct and leading an immoral personal life, an accusation that is routinely made towards female political prisoners. She has thus far been denied access to her lawyer.

Fariba Pajooh is a child of the Islamic Revolution. She was born a year after the Revolution to a mother who is a medical doctor and an Air Force officer father who served sixty-eight months at the Iran-Iraq front and sustained lasting injuries. [...] Fariba's only apparent crime was to support a carefully vetted reformist candidate. The Islamic Republic is indeed devouring her own children.