An independent Kurdish group for human rights has revealed widespread torture carried out in “Revolutionary Guards and intelligence ministry’s secret detention centers” in Kurdish areas of Iran.
In its report last week based on interviews with former detainees, France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), accused the Islamic Republic of using tortures like attaching weights to testicles, hanging detainees from the ceiling, and beating them with hoses and cables in its secret centers.
The report specifically cited an intelligence ministry detention center in Orumiyeh, West Azarbaijan province, and two IRGC centers in Orumiyeh and Sanandaj, both in Kurdistan province. It said one detention center had very small cells known as graves.
The ex-detainees told KHRN that had been victims of false confession as interrogators had used threats such as raping the detainees' families. Detainees also said interrogators also staged fake executions to encourage confessions.
Former Kurdish political prisoner Mohammad-Hossein Rezaei, who spent time at the intelligence ministry's Sanandaj detention center, told the organization that he had been tied to a table and beaten with cables, damaging his nose and ribs.
Another Kurdish prisoner, Roya Toloui, who is a journalist and civil rights activist now living in the US has claimed that after her arrest in 2006 she was tortured and raped at intelligence ministry detention center of Sanandaj for refusing to put her signature on confessions that had been written by her interrogators.
According to the report, the IRGC intelligence in West Azerbaijan province had the capacity to detain several hundred.
