It was a life and death decision that was made in a split second. And once made, Saeed Malekpour knew there would be no turning back.

“I knew I would rather die than go back to prison,” he said. “It was not really a choice for me.”

Malekpour, 44, a Canadian permanent resident, was in his mother’s home in Tehran, savouring his first breath of freedom from the fetid cells of Iran’s feared Evin Prison.

For 11 years, he had been locked up on spurious charges in conditions few humans could withstand: beaten, tortured, held in solitary confinement for more than 500 days, and twice put on death row, awaiting an execution that could come without warning.

With his last death sentence commuted to life, he was granted a brief furlough, on condition that he could raise money for bail. And after years of waiting for approval, he was given the chance for a brief three-day respite.

It was the starting point of a perilous escape that he knew could lead either to freedom or disaster. Its success was owed to luck, as well as his own ingenuity and the unflagging support of his sister, and a group of international advocates who paved the way for his return to Canada.

Now back in his former home, the West Coast, Malekpour recalls the tense days before the furlough, locked in a dank cell with other prisoners, pondering his fate.

“I made some plans then, but I was still thinking maybe I should just go back to prison and wait,” he said in a phone interview from Vancouver.

But when the time came, the taste of freedom was too sweet for hesitation and the thought of looming captivity too bitter.

Once out of prison, he said, “I talked to Maryam on the phone and told her I’d rather die than go back. She was ready to help — but she said I would have to act quickly. I said yes right away.”

It was Malekpour’s younger sister Maryam who had raised $35,000 for his bail and campaigned for his furlough for five years before it was granted. From the time of his arrest, she had tirelessly worked for his release, and was herself forced to flee Iran when her attempts to bring worldwide attention to his plight put her at risk of arrest and torture. After escaping to Canada seven years ago, she redoubled her efforts, making contact with politicians, activists, international lawyers and NGOs.

Among the most dedicated were the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, whose chair, former justice minister and MP Irwin Cotler, acted as a pro bono counsel for Malekpour and Amnesty International, which launched worldwide campaigns to raise awareness of his plight and lobbied for his release.

But once outside prison walls, Saeed would begin his 2,000-kilometre journey alone, departing at a moment’s notice and telling no one, not even his mother, who had spent so many emotionally lacerating days and nights waiting for his return.

“I left with just a backpack and a bit of money,” he said. “I knew she would have been very worried if she knew what I was planning and I had to keep it secret.

He had survived a heart attack last October and knew travel would not be easy: “I was not in ideal shape.” Nevertheless, he had kept up a regime of exercise while in jail and was prepared for whatever was to come.

Malekpour’s plan quickly took shape.

In northern Iran, closer to the Turkish border, he had relatives and friends. He hoped that a family visit would evade suspicion. His furlough had been extended by four days, giving his travel plan more credence.

Once there, he again kept the escape plan secret from his family.

He slipped away, taking rides in a series of cars, each bringing him closer to the frontier. After one ride, he found himself alone near an unfamiliar village, not knowing in which direction to turn. In the darkness, one wrong move could be his last.

“It was about 1 a.m. and I didn’t know where I was. There were no cars around, and a dog started to chase me.”

Once again his luck held. After following an unknown path for more than a kilometre, “I saw a guy there, and he told me where to walk. Then I managed to get a taxi.”

In difficult conditions, Malekpour crossed the border. “It was like a war zone there. That was the most stressful time and I was only getting one or two hours of sleep a night.”

Once outside Iran, he was joined by a human rights advocate, who came to steer his safe passage through Turkey.

Malekpour had been stripped of his Canadian permanent residency documents, as well as his Iranian passport, on arrest. An undocumented traveller in a volatile region in political ferment, bordered by regional wars and struggling with an ongoing refugee crisis, faced constant peril.

Normally it would take weeks, or even months, for replacement of Malekpour’s Canadian documents and he prepared for a difficult and drawn-out time in hiding.

But in Monteal, Brandon Silver, the Wallenberg Centre’s director of policy and projects who was the contact point for the international team of supporters, contacted Ottawa, pressing the case for urgent action. “It was only possible through Professor Cotler's own relationship with (Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland) and his (long) engagements with her on this case,” he said.

With Freeland’s help, the papers were expedited.

“I never expected anything like that,” Malekpour said. “But I knew that Brandon and Cotler were working very hard, and I could feel that people were all watching out for me.”

Awaiting Malekpour’s arrival in Turkey were his sister Maryam, accompanied by Washington-based human rights defender Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, who had helped Maryam come to Canada.

Nayeb Yazdi, who had spearheaded the campaign for Saeed’s release — and for numerous political prisoners in Iran — for more than a decade, co-ordinated his safe passage through Turkey with the support of an American donor. Her efforts were rewarded as she watched brother and sister reunited.

“They were pretty much speechless,” she said. “They just hugged each other.”

Within hours, all three headed to the airport with tickets to Munich and Vancouver. The final hurdle was at the airport, where officials were reluctant to accept Malekpour’s rapidly issued travel document, putting him at risk of arrest or deportation.

“They finally let us through,” Malekpour said. “But I was still worried about what would happen when we landed in Germany.”

However, their arrival in Munich was smooth, and the exhausted travelers finally boarded their flight to Vancouver. There, they were met by a welcoming party of Canadian officials, who took Malekpour aside, avoiding lineups at the customs and immigration desks. Only when his feet touched Canadian soil did he realize that his cruel ordeal was over.

But after so many years of imprisonment, torture and threatened execution, troubling questions remained. Why him? And why had he been singled out for such barbaric treatment?

“I still don’t know what happened to me,” Malekpour said.

Like many Iranians seeking a better life, Malekpour had immigrated to Canada, arriving in 2004 and settling in Victoria, B.C. While awaiting Canadian citizenship, he had planned to take a post-graduate engineering degree. To support himself, he used his computer expertise as a web designer.

Four years later, an urgent summons to the bedside of his dying father in Tehran plunged him into a dystopian scenario that could have been taken from the pages of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial.

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

Shortly after arrival, Malekpour was seized on a Tehran street.

“I was on my way to see a dentist, and I had no idea someone was following me,” he said. “A very big guy told me to show him my ID. He said ‘I have a gun.’ I didn’t know (then) he was from the ministry of intelligence. I showed him my passport and he said it was fake.”

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Malekpour was shoved into a car, handcuffed and blindfolded. “I thought I was being kidnapped. We arrived at a building and I didn’t know where I was. After two hours they started to beat me. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.”

Disregarding Malekpour’s passport, his captors insisted, bizarrely, that his name was really Siavash Hosseinkani — someone he had never heard of or met. “They kept beating me for an hour and I was bleeding. I told them ‘my family isn’t rich.’ ”

For days, several men took turns beating him, until the left side of his body went numb and he lost consciousness. Over days of torture, his jaw and teeth were broken, he was lashed with cables, suffered paralyzing electric shocks and was threatened with rape. It was only later that he discovered he was in the hands of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

He was briefly taken to hospital, blindfolded, and told there was nothing wrong with him: “the doctor said I should just take a shower.” Still he refused to answer to the name the torturers were insisting he admit.

Meanwhile his (now ex) wife, Fatima Eftekhari, arrived from Canada. After weeks in a cramped solitary cell, not knowing where he was, and listening to the screaming of other prisoners, Malekpour was confronted by one of his tormentors who dialed Eftekhari’s number and threated to arrest her.

“After that, they told me to (repeat) everything they said. And I agreed.”

Battered by psychological and physical torture, and fearing for the life of his wife, Malekpour made a forced — and false — confession, which was broadcast on state television.

“They said ‘we were looking for somebody and we chose you because you’re a web developer. People use your programs (to distribute pornography.) Western countries are behind those porn sites.’ They told me to say the U.S. and U.K gave me money” to corrupt the morals of Iranian internet users.

Those who have studied Iran’s growing obsession with control of cyberspace say Malekpour had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As a computer expert and an expatriate, he ticked two of the boxes on the IRGC’s target list.

In 2008, on the eve of an election they feared could stir dissent that would threaten the regime, paranoia was escalating. Iranians who immigrated to the West were looked on as potential traitors, a trend that has only increased in the past decade. And those with Internet expertise were doubly suspicious.

The IRGC needed to make an example of an “enemy of the state” who could be paraded to fuel fear among the country’s young and Internet-savvy population and who they believed would develop subversive Western ideas and use social media as a rallying point for revolution.

Malekpour was a “trophy” for the IRGC, said Maziar Bahari, a journalist, author and former Iranian political prisoner. “He’s among the first (their) cyber crimes department arrested. They even mentioned him several times (in the media) saying that they have the technological savvy to hack into websites and lure people back to Iran,” Bahari told the Star.

Malekpour’s captors insisted that they had linked him with a porn distribution network as its mastermind — a charge that even Iranian courts dismissed, and commuted his sentence to life. The IRGC ignored it, redoubling their efforts to execute him, and saying failure to carry out “swift punishment” would “increase the brazenness of (cyber) criminals.”

Malekpour’s punishment was both lengthy and draconian.

“I was held in solitary confinement several times,” he said. “The first time it was 320 days, second time for about two months, third time for two days, and last time for 195 days. I was also held in cells with one or two other prisoners for about three and half years.”

A recently released independent legal decision from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the harshness of Malekpour’s ordeal violates international law and “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

“Mr. Malekpour was detained as a result of the broader political context involving Iran and Canada, and his career as a software engineer made him a target for the Iranian authorities,” it said, concluding, “there is no evidence (he) was involved in operation of pornographic websites.”

Malekpour’s arrest, it said, was part of a wider pattern of targeting foreign and dual nationals and Iranians with permanent residency in another country, adding that he was detained on “discriminatory grounds.”

A report by University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab outlined Iran’s growing crackdown on use of the Internet: “The regime considers cyberspace a geopolitical as much as a domestic policy realm. Surveillance and censorship are simultaneously tools of suppression and a means of national defence.”

Malekpour was condemned to death after a mock trial that bore no resemblance to justice. “Any day they might have executed me, and I was ready for that,” he said.

After the first death sentence was repealed, it was reinstated by the judge who originally condemned Malekpour. In the meantime, his wife told him she wanted a divorce. And he learned that Maryam was in imminent danger, warning her, on a brief prison visit, to leave the country.

In December 2012, the courts again commuted Malekpour’s sentence to life imprisonment, for lack of evidence. He was moved to a “general cell,” allowed brief exercise periods and filled the endless hours by teaching himself wood working.

Weakened by years of brutal treatment, he suffered a heart attack and was taken to hospital under 24-hour guard, and handcuffed to the bed. Applications for a pardon on humanitarian grounds were ignored.

Now free, once again living in the surroundings where he had expected to spend his life, close to the mountains and the ocean that he loves, he is trying to make sense of his lost decade.

A graduate metallurgical engineer, whose brilliant academic record earned him the nickname “the genius,” he is pondering a new career and looking to upgrade the computer skills that have fallen behind in his years of captivity. Hardships still lie ahead. Having lost home, money and possessions, he is starting again with nothing.

The hope for justice is also elusive. But after so many years in darkness, he has emerged bruised but grateful for the newfound rays of light.

“I have lost my youth,” he says. “But before I went to prison I felt that if I lost freedom for even one day I would die. I found that wasn’t true. I learned that I can do anything. I feel as though the world, and life, are more beautiful than ever before.”

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