A 19-year-old prisoner in Gorgan’s Amir Abad prison in northeastern Iran was tortured to death yesterday. According to a report by the Human Rights News Agency, the young man was identified as Mohammad Davaji, from Oudek Davaji village, detained for getting into a fight.
An eyewitness said the guards wanted to punish Mohammad for getting into a prison fight.
“They took off his clothes and cuffed his hands and his feet while he was naked. The guards hung him upside down from the prison ceiling in the cold. They beat him until he was unconscious, and then poured cold water on him to punish him,” the prisoner said.
He said the guards tortured 19-year-old Mohammad in front of other prisoners to “teach them a lesson”.
“Mohammad Davaji was not able to tolerate further torture and lost his life near dawn,” the eyewitness said.
According to the report, following his death, strict security measures were implemented. A few inmates who were to be released yesterday were not given permission to leave the prison.
This is second incident of death under torture in prison this month.
On November 10, 27-year-old Farhad Vosuqi was also tortured to death in Khorramabad Central Prison, western Iran. Farhad was married and father to a three-month-old boy.
On October 25, a 30-year-old man was beaten in public while handcuffed to a pole in Mashhad, northeastern Iran. The police’s excessive use of pepper spray from close range into Mehrdad Sepehri’s face led to his death.
The Iranian regime systematically tortures prisoners as punishment or to extract “confessions” which are later used to incriminate them in court.
According to Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Any act of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is an offence to human dignity and shall be condemned as a denial of the purposes of the Charter of the United Nations and as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
