Prisoner of conscience Maryam Akbari Monfared has been threatened with an additional three-year prison term and exile to a remote prison. This was in reprisal for her open letters seeking truth and justice for her siblings who were extrajudicially executed in 1988. She has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since 2009 serving a 15-year sentence.
On 13 May, Maryam Akbari Monfared’s husband Hassan Jafari Hatam presented himself to a Ministry of Intelligence office in Tehran after being summoned by telephone for interrogation. He was given no reasons for the summons. Hassan Jafari Hatam has said that at the Ministry, intelligence officials verbally abused him and threatened that his wife would face an additional three-year prison term and exile to a remote prison in Sistan-Baluchestan province, south-eastern Iran. They said that these threats would be implemented unless she stopped writing open letters about the fate and whereabouts of several thousand political prisoners, including two of her siblings, who were extrajudicially executed in the summer of 1988. Maryam Akbari Monfared has written several open letters since October 2016 when she filed a formal complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office. She is seeking an official investigation into the 1988 massacre, the location of the mass graves where the prisoners’ bodies were buried, and the identity of the perpetrators.
