The following case studies detail eight examples of forced confessions elicited after Abdulali Ali-Asgari became director general of IRIB in May 2016, and one that occurred prior to Ali-Asgari’s appointment. Although the regime has subjected many other Iranians to coerced confessions since 2016, these particular cases offer representative examples of the regime’s targets and of IRIB’s strategies and tactics.

The first eight case studies are organized chronologically, according to when IRIB aired each one. Three case studies involve forced, false confessions by members of minority religious and ethnic groups; these examples demonstrate how IRIB demonizes entire minority communities by exploiting selected scapegoats. Three other cases illustrate how the regime vilifies the United States, Israel, and other countries by targeting dual-nationals and presenting them as spies. One case exemplifies the regime’s treatment of political prisoners who are outspoken about their abuse in prison. Another case involves two participants in White Wednesday, a movement critical of compulsory hijabs, whose personal lives were exploited on Iranian television.

The final study illuminates the brutal treatment of Iran’s prisoners in detention, and outlines why Ottawa, in particular, should take action against the regime in support of Canada’s own permanent resident.

Kaveh (Abubakr) Sharifi

Kaveh Sharifi, also known as Abubakr, was a religious Sunni Kurd living in the Golshan neighborhood of Sanandaj, one of the capitals of Iran’s Kurdistan province. In 2007, Shiite preachers began making defamatory statements about Sunnis. In response, Sunni youth from Kurdish provinces held classes to raise awareness and defend their religious beliefs. They also distributed books and CDs that documented anti-Sunni rhetoric.

This campaign grew, and between 2009 and 2011, intelligence officials cracked down on the Sunni Kurdish minority. Amidst armed confrontations and assassinations, members of the regime’s intelligence apparatus arrested hundreds of Sunni men in Kurdistan Province, accusing them of being extremists associated with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the like, though no evidence supported this.

On September 24, 2009, while Sharifi was walking from his sister’s home to a mosque for morning prayers, agents of the Sanandaj Information Administration blindfolded and arrested him. Four months later, his family learned of his incarceration, and in late January 2010, they visited him at the Sanandaj Information Administration detention center. In an interview with the Abdorrahmen Boroumand Foundation, a trusted source revealed that he was held by his arms during the visit because he could not walk; the guards had beaten the soles of his feet. He endured severe torture while in detention, causing frequent internal bleeding in his stomach.

Over the next four years, Sharifi was denied access to an attorney, seldom saw his family, was transferred to two other prisons, and was frequently held in solitary confinement.

Along with other Sunni detainees, Sharifi secretly recorded himself inside prison on a mobile phone and posted the recording to social media. He reported that MOI officials ordered him to memorize six pages of text containing his forced confession. “They even told me how I should move my hands and keep a happy face so that no one would suspect I was held in solitary confinement or ill-treated,” he said. Sharifi confessed to crimes he never committed, both during off-camera interrogations and on-camera interviews.

Nearly five years after his arrest, Sharifi and four others stood trial in Branch 28 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided by Judge Mohammad Moghisseh. They were charged with the crime of “waging war against God.” Sharifi faced the additional charge of “possession of a firearm and participation in the attack against the Revolutionary Guards military base.” They were accused of being members of a fictitious extremist group called Towhid and Jihad (“Unity and Jihad”), which the MOI had fabricated after the Sunni Kurds’ arrests in 2009.

According to the Kurdistan Province Judiciary, the forced confessions from the interrogations and interviews were used as evidence. The trial, which lasted less than 10 minutes, concluded with a death sentence for all five defendants. On February 1, 2014, Branch 32 of Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentences.

On August 2, 2016, while Sharifi was still hospitalized from a heart attack he suffered the day prior, he was taken to a solitary confinement cell. A day later, Sharifi and 24 others accused of being members of Towhid and Jihad were hanged at Raja’i Shahr Prison.

On the day of the executions, IRIB’s Kurdistan Province branch broadcast Sharifi’s and other Sunni Kurds’ coerced confessions in a five-part program called Terror and Takfir.

In part one, the program identified Sharifi as the commander of Towhid and Jihad. In his false confession, Sharifi recited the six pages of text MOI officials instructed him to memorize. He was also forced to say that Towhid and Jihad falsely blamed the Iranian government for Sunni casualties of the group’s terror operations.

In part two, Sharifi discussed purported plans to assassinate a Shiite judge, again from a text prepared by his captors. In part five, Sharifi explained his fake group’s philosophy. He said all who oppose the group, including ordinary people, are considered infidels and targets of its terror operations.

In a November 2016 press release, Amnesty International said, “By parading death row prisoners on national TV, the authorities are blatantly attempting to convince the public of their ‘guilt,’ but they cannot mask the disturbing truth that the executed men were convicted of vague and broadly defined offences and sentenced to death after grossly unfair trials.”

Screenshots from the IRIB program Terror and Takfir. The caption says the clip is of Sharifi addressing a group of Kurdish university students.

Xiyue Wang

Xiyue Wang is a Chinese-born naturalized citizen of the United States and a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His doctoral studies focused on local governance in Persia from 1880 to 1921.

Wang sought to travel to Iran to study Farsi and bolster his research with primary source documents. In 2016, Wang secured authorization from both Princeton University and the regime to travel to the country twice. He was granted a student visa by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On May 1, 2016, Wang arrived in Iran for his second trip to continue his research. In July 2016, while Wang was sifting through historical, unclassified documents with no relevance to Iranian national security, the Iranian Diplomatic Police, a branch of Iran’s national police, summoned him for questioning and interrogated him for four hours without a lawyer present.

On August 7, 2016, the Diplomatic Police arrested Wang at his apartment and sent him to Evin Prison. Wang was held in solitary confinement for 18 days and had no access to a lawyer until September 13. Five months later, Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court officially charged Wang with espionage and collaborating with the “hostile State” (that is, the United States). On April 29, 2017, the Revolutionary Court found Wang guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Wang’s lawyer filed an appeal, but on August 14, 2017, Branch 54 of the Revolutionary Court denied it.

Wang described to his family how he suffered in prison. Wang revealed to them that he lost weight and suffered from “chest pain, severe back pain, fever, rash, headaches, vomiting, stomach aches, severe tooth pain, foot injuries, arthritis, constipation, insomnia, and diarrhea.” He told his family that he did not see sunlight for weeks at a time and frequently battled suicidal thoughts and depression.

After solitary confinement, Wang was placed in a series of dirty and overcrowded cells where he had to sleep on a 20-square-meter floor with up to 25 other prisoners. Some of his cellmates were members of the Taliban, who beat and threatened to kill him. Despite numerous requests from the Swiss Embassy and Wang’s lawyer in Iran, Wang was denied medical treatment outside of the prison.

In November 2017, IRIB Channel 2 ran a six-minute program on Wang that included his forced confession. Asma Jahangir, then the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, confirmed that “a State television channel aired an apparent ‘confession’ which is understood to have been coerced.” Wang joins Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian and freelance journalist Roxana Saberi on the list of American citizens the Islamic regime has imprisoned and forced to falsely confess – Saberi in 2009 and Rezaian in 2014.

Wang spoke English when he appeared on the program. He did not say anything explicitly self-incriminating; rather, he only described his academic work and its importance. The producers used bits and pieces of this interview, often cutting his sentences short and then filling in the blanks themselves to paint Wang as a CIA agent. His sentence fragments were interspersed with pictures of the CIA seal and footage of Princeton students walking across campus as “ominous music suggesting villainy thrummed in the background,” The Washington Post reported.

On December 7, 2019, Tehran released Wang from prison as part of a prisoner exchange with the United States. He returned safely to his family.

Screenshots from IRIB TV2’s program on Xiyue Wang (top), which attempts to paint Wang as a CIA opperative.

Ahmadreza Djalali

Ahmadreza Djalali is an Iranian-born physician specializing in emergency medicine. Djalali lived in Sweden and lectured at the Karolinska Institute, a medical university from which he received a Ph.D. in disaster medicine.

In April 2016, when he travelled to Iran at the invitation of the University of Tehran to lecture on disaster relief, agents of Iran’s MOI arrested Djalali. The regime accused Djalali of collaborating with Israel between 2010 and 2012 to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. The then-prosecutor of Tehran, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, charged Djalali with “collaborating with a hostile government,” claiming Djalali sent the Mossad names and information on more than 30 Iranian nuclear and military scientists.

Without evidence, Dolatabadi alleged that the information enabled the murders of two Iranian nuclear scientists in 2010, Massoud Ali Mohammadi and Majid Shahriari.

After his arrest, Djalali spent three months in solitary confinement and seven months without access to a lawyer. On October 21, 2017, Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran found Djalali guilty and sentenced him to death. The Iranian Ministry of Justice’s news outlet, Mizan Online, labeled him a “Mossad agent.” On December 5, 2017, the Supreme Court upheld Djalali’s death sentence.

On December 17, 2017, Djalali’s forced confession aired on Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN), an IRIB news program based in Tehran. In a 17-minute pseudo-documentary called Axed from the Roots, Djalali told a false story about meeting “Thomas,” a supposed Mossad agent who introduced himself as an employee of a European company that later hired Djalali. The narrator said that “Mossad agents” including “Thomas” asked Djalali to divulge information on Iran’s nuclear program and its scientists.

Under duress, Djalali continued to tell the false story, describing the protocol for his meetings with Mossad agents, and the documentary purported to show footage of one of these meetings. The narrator claimed that Djalali met with these “agents” more than 50 times and expected citizenship in an unspecified Western European country as a reward.

In December 2017, Djalali’s wife, Vida Mehrannia, who lives in Sweden with their two children, told the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran:

After being held in solitary confinement for the first three months of his detention, they threatened to kill his kids in Sweden and let him die in prison without telling anyone if he didn’t cooperate… It’s obvious from the video that Ahmadreza is not acting normal. At the time, he was under so much psychological pressure that he was given pills. That’s why he slurred his words in some places and was told to repeat his sentences. This interview was recorded under pressure and was not aired in full.

That same month, BBC Persian aired an audio file released by Djalali’s in which Djalali denied the forced confessions and explained that he was recorded in prison while his psychological condition was poor. He also said he was promised freedom in exchange for falsely confessing on camera. In an undated letter sent from Evin Prison, Djalali wrote that the real reason for his incarceration was his refusal to spy for the MOI.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights repeatedly called on Iran to annul Djalali’s death sentence and allow him a fair trial “in line with international standards.” On February 17, 2018, the Swedish government granted Djalali citizenship in an effort to improve the chances of his release.

Last year, Amnesty International issued an open letter to the prosecutor general of Tehran, Ali Alghasi Mehr, describing Djalali’s poor physical condition. He had lost 53 pounds and had a low white blood cell count. The letter called on the regime to provide Djalali with appropriate medical care.

Authorities transferred Djalali from Evin Prison to an undisclosed location on July 29, 2019. As of February 5, 2020, he remains on death row.

Screenshot of Ahmadreza Djalali making a forced confession in the IRIB-produced Axed from the Roots (left). An undated photo of Djalali from prison (right).

Mohammad Salas Babajani

Sufi Gonabandi dervishes are followers of Shiite Islam and a religious minority in Iran. Dervishes describe themselves as rejecters of violence, politics, and wealth; they aspire to promote austerity, peace, and equality. They believe that through mystical practices and adherence to Sharia, they can achieve truth and a connection with God.

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran in 2005, the Islamist regime has routinely arrested Sufi Gonabandi dervishes and targeted their homes and places of worship. The regime has sentenced dervishes to lashes, prison, and exile.

In February 2018, amidst fears that the Basij militia would arrest their spiritual leader, Noor Ali Tabandeh, Gonabandi dervishes surrounded his home in Tehran to protect him. On February 19, riot police and members of the Basij confronted the dervishes, arresting more than 300 and injuring dozens. During these confrontations, a bus struck and killed three members of the Basij militia.

The individuals the Basij arrested included Mohammad Salas Babajani. Hours later, while lying on a hospital bed, still in pain from head injuries sustained during his arrest, Salas was forced to falsely confess to driving the bus that killed the Basij members.

Salas described himself becoming angry and losing control in a moment of passion. “I give my condolences,” he said. “What’s happened has happened. I’m going to be executed; what can I do? I’ve got two kids. I’ve my whole life to be successful. Let them execute me: what can I do?”

This forced confession was uploaded to Iran’s domestic video-sharing service, Aparat, by what appears to be a third party unaffiliated with the Islamist regime. Though Aparat is not officially affiliated with IRIB, the regime plays a role in monitoring the site and censoring any content deemed illegal.

In March 2018, Branch 9 of Tehran’s Province Criminal Court One tried Salas for the killings. Salas’ false confession was the only evidence discussed in court. At his final court session, presided by Mohammadi Kashkuli, Salas finally had an attorney of his choosing. He retracted his forced confessions and explained that he was coerced into making them. He stressed that he was apprehended by the Basij before the bus collision and therefore could not have been the assailant.

The court did not summon witnesses prepared to corroborate Salas’ claims. Though Salas’ lawyer, Zeynab Taheri, told the judge she had new, exculpatory evidence, the judge did not order an investigation into this evidence. No forensic investigation was conducted into the fingerprints on the steering wheel of the bus, even though doing so would have exonerated Salas.

On March 19, 2018, Branch 9 of Tehran Province Criminal Court One sentenced Salas to one year in prison, 74 lashes, and death. On April 15, 2018, Branch 39 of the Supreme Court upheld this sentence, and the head of Iran’s judiciary confirmed this decision.

Salas’ lawyer released an audio on May 22, 2018, in which Salas denied killing anyone, saying, “I was not the driver of the bus that killed those people. I am not a killer. I cannot even kill an ant… The police have fabricated all of this.”

On June 18, 2018, a video featuring Salas titled The Face of Justice was archived on Mizan Online, the news outlet of Iran’s Ministry of Justice. In it, Salas falsely confessed in court that he drove the bus and cedes a history of drug abuse and disturbing public order.

The video also showed family members of the three dead Basij members in court asking for a death sentence. The narrator claimed Salas said in court he was in love with the idea of execution and that the deaths of the three Basij members were the will of God. The video, however, did not provide evidence of Salas making these comments. At its conclusion, the documentary portrayed foreign-based human rights organizations and media as having misrepresented the case. The film did not mention any organizations by name.

After The Face of Justice aired, Salas’ daughter told Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), “He was tortured before and after the arrest. They broke his finger after the first trial when he denied the allegations of deliberately killing police officers.”

Salas was hanged on June 18, 2018, at Raja’i Shahr Prison, in the city of Karaj.

Screenshots of Salas’ forced confession uploaded to Aparat, extracted hours after his arrest on February 19, 2018.

Screenshot from The Face of Justice. Here, the video includes footage from one of Salas’ earlier court appearances, during which he delivered a false, coerced confession.

Houshmand Alipour and Mohammad Ostadghader

Houshmand Alipour and Mohammad Ostadghader are Iranian-Kurdish friends from northwest Iran near the Iraqi border. Alipour is from Sardasht, while Ostadghader lives in Saqqez. Alipour’s family cedes that both Alipour and Ostadghader are members of the Kurdish Freedom Party (PAK) but do not participate in the party’s violent activities. Rather, the family says, the two raise awareness about PAK among Iranian Kurds and engage in strictly political activities. There is no independent verification of this claim.

Alipour and Ostadghader were arrested on August 3, 2018, in connection with an attack on a police station in Saqqez earlier that day. Ostadghader was shot in the leg during his arrest. He did not receive any medical care for his injury. On August 9, PAK issued a statement claiming responsibility for that attack, noting that Alipour and Ostadghader did not take part. Rather, PAK sent them to the scene to rescue injured PAK members. Upon doing so, the two were arrested.

On August 9, Akam News, an MOI-affiliated outlet, reported that a Kurdish “terrorist team” had been apprehended. The article included a video of Alipour and Ostadghader falsely confessing to committing previous crimes and intending to commit more.

The two men were forced to say on camera that the United States lied about training Kurds to fight the Islamic State, when it actually trained them to commit acts of terror within Iran. No evidence besides this forced confession suggests Iran was the focus of this training.

On the same day as the publication of the Akam News article, the video-sharing site Aparat uploaded another video featuring Alipour and Ostadghader. Their faces are blurred, the audio does not correspond with the video, and the rhythm of their voices suggests they likely read from a written statement. The audio playing over the footage said Alipour went to Saqquez as part of a team with orders from PAK to strike a security facility. When Ostadghader appeared on screen, the audio alleged he targeted intelligence personnel with grenades and firearms. It is not clear in either case whether the voice is that of the victim or of an IRIB narrator.

Alipour’s father told IHR he had not been permitted to communicate with his son in detention. However, Houshmand Alipour was able to briefly speak with Hejar Alipour, his brother, while detained at the Intelligence Office in Sanandaj.

“Under torture,” Hejar wrote in an open letter to human rights groups, “they have been forced to falsely implicate themselves, thus validating national security charges being levied against them… The extraction of confessions under violent torture, the broadcasting of those confessions[,] … the refusal to allow contact with attorneys or families, and denying visitation, are all violations of the basic rights of any prisoner … set forth by the Islamic Republic.”

Hossein Ahmadniaz, the lawyer slated to represent the pair in court, told IHR on August 27, 2018, that Alipour and Ostadghader’s cases were tried at the Third Investigate Branch of the Saqqez County Court. Ahmadniaz said they had been charged with “war against God,” a crime punishable by death. Reports from April 15, 2019, indicate that their cases were referred from Branch 2 of the Prosecutor’s Office to Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court, both located in Sanandaj. The courts relied on their forced confessions to determine their sentences.

On December 30, 2019, the Revolutionary Court in Sanandaj sentenced Alipour to death, plus 16 years in prison. On January 23, 2020, a report emerged that the same court sentenced Ostadghader to 11 years in prison.

Screenshots of Alipour (left) and Ostadghader (right) falsely confessing in a video produced by IRIB and posted to Aparat.

Niloufar Bayani

Born and raised in Tehran, Niloufar Bayani earned degrees in biology and conservation from McGill University and Columbia University. She later joined the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in Geneva.

In the summer of 2017, Bayani returned to Iran as a program manager for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF), an Iranian non-governmental organization. Eight PWHF colleagues traveled to Iran with Bayani.

Since its founding in 2008, PWHF had worked with Iran’s Department of the Environment. Representatives of the PWHF traveled to Iran to track the Asiatic Cheetah, an endangered species, using wildlife camera traps.

On January 24, 2018, agents of the Intelligence Organization of the IRGC arrested Niloufar and her colleagues. The IRGC accused them of using their camera traps to record classified military information. It alleged they posed as conservationists to cover for espionage activity on behalf of the United States and Israel.

PWHF’s managing director, Kavous Seyed-Emami, a professor with Canadian citizenship, died in Evin Prison on February 9, 2018, two weeks after his arrest. Tehran’s prosecutor general claimed that Seyed-Emami committed suicide, but his colleagues and family reject this claim. Days later, IRIB’s 20:30 news program aired a video smearing Seyed-Emami as a spy for the United States and Israel. Seyed-Emami’s son, Ramin, revealed that IRIB journalist Ali Rezvani coerced Seyed-Emami’s wife to speak out against her husband for the program.

On July 31, 2018, the families of the eight remaining conservationists wrote an open letter stating that their loved ones were held in Evin Prison without access to counsel. The letter called on parliamentarians to visit the prison to hear their side of the story.

When family members visited Evin, they noticed the prisoners had broken teeth, scars on their faces, and bruises all over their bodies. The Center for Human Rights in Iran also revealed that Bayani and her colleagues “were subjected to months of solitary confinement and psychological torture, threatened with death, threatened with being injected with hallucinogenic drugs, threatened with arrest and the death of family members.”

In September 2018, IRIB attempted to frame Bayani by airing a pseudo-documentary about her, staging her supposed crimes. An anonymous source informed IHR that “plainclothes officers” took Bayani from Evin Prison to film her in various places around Tehran. They brought her to a beauty salon and offered her a haircut, then took her to a shopping mall in Lavason and encouraged her to “go on a shopping spree.” The anonymous source said that Bayani realized the strangeness of the circumstances and therefore “refused to leave the car.” The source also reported, “Upon needing to use the bathroom after several hours, [Bayani] noticed that one of the plainclothes officers was filming her every move from behind a tree. She immediately retreated to the car.”

On October 24, 2018, Tehran’s then-prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi formally charged Bayani and three others with “sowing corruption on Earth,” an indictment that could carry the death penalty. The other four conservationists face lesser charges, including espionage and “collusion against national security.

At risk of additional torture, Bayani, who was denied a lawyer of her choosing, repeatedly interrupted the first day of her trial in Tehran on January 30, 2019. As Judge Abolghassem Salavati of Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court read the 300-page indictment, Bayani announced that the forced confession, which was the only evidence cited in her indictment, was made under physical and psychological duress. IRIB has not yet aired Bayani’s forced confession and those of her fellow detainees. They purportedly made their forced confessions off- camera in Evin Prison, and IRGC agents who claimed to be witnesses relayed it to Tehran’s prosecutor.

On February 2, 2019, the second day of her trial, Bayani continued to speak about her abuse. Bayani said in court, “If you were being threatened with a needle of hallucinogenic drugs [hovering] above your arm, you would also confess to whatever they wanted you to confess.”

Some regime officials have denounced these indictments against Bayani and her colleagues and called for their immediate release. On May 22, 2018, the head of Iran’s Department of the Environment, Vice President Isa Kalantari, repudiated the IRGC’s allegations, stating, “[T]he detained activists should be released because there’s no evidence to prove the accusations leveled against these individuals.” Members of the Majlis also asked President Hassan Rouhani to ensure the defendants’ legal rights had not been compromised.

The international community has also spoken up about the detainment and treatment of Bayani and her colleagues. In October 2018, the head of UNEP declared that the environmentalists “deserve the utmost support and fullest protection which Iran’s laws and constitution guarantee.” Two days later, the International Union for Conservation of Nature issued a formal statement denouncing the arrests and treatment of the conservationists and called for an independent investigation into the death of Seyed-Emami. In early November 2018, an open letter signed by more than 1,000 conservationists and environmentalists and addressed to Iran’s then-chief justice, Ayatollah Amoli Larijani, affirmed the eight detainees’ long history of professional environmental work and called for an equitable and fair judicial process.

The regime’s persecution continues regardless. On November 6, 2019, the eight conservationists were accused of new charges. The regime alleged “cooperation with U.S. and Israeli enemy states against the Islamic Republic of Iran for the purpose of espionage for the CIA and Mossad.” Bayani and Morad Tahbaz were handed an additional charge of “gaining income through illegitimate means.”

A few days later, IRIB Channel 3 broadcast another documentary about the conservationists, titled The Usual Suspects. The program abruptly stopped after just two minutes, with IRIB’s public relations office citing “technical issues.” Ramin Seyed-Emami identified the reporter who appeared in the first minute of the video as one of the IRGC agents who raided his father’s home after he died in Evin Prison.

On November 20, 2019, without lawyers in the room, the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced Bayani and five others to six to 10 years in prison. UNEP subsequently issued a “call for clemency and urge[d] the Iranian authorities to review and overturn these sentences.”

Undated headshot of Niloufar Bayani from the Scholars at Risk Network website.

Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Gholian

Esmail Bakhshi and Sepideh Gholian are labor rights activists in Iran. Bakhshi worked at the Haft Tappeh Sugar Cane Company, located in Shush, Khuzestan. Gholian was a university student. After peacefully protesting Haft Tappeh’s unpaid wages outside the office of the governor of Khuzestan on November 18, 2018, the two activists were arrested. Both were coerced into confessing on tape. After a month in a MOI detention center without access to a lawyer, they were released on bail.

After their release, Bakhshi and Gholian accused security and intelligence agents of torturing them. Bakhshi published a letter on his Instagram page on January 4, 2019, and Gholian posted a video to social media in early January 2019. On January 14, 2019, Iran’s attorney general, Mohammed Jafar Montazari, claimed the torture accusations “were fundamentally lies and that there has been no beatings or torture.” Human Rights Watch declared that the regime “failed to conduct any credible investigations into the torture allegations.”

On January 19, 2019, the forced confessions by Bakhshi and Gholian from November 2018 aired on IRIB Channel 2. The video is accessible on the website of Ensaf News, an opposition newspaper that appears in print and online. Their forced confessions were the subject of a segment titled The Burnt Plot. The watermarks on the video indicate it is an IRIB production. Among other things, the video aimed to discredit the Iranian labor rights movement as a foreign conspiracy connected to the United States and Israel. Esmail Bakhshi’s forced confession is specifically used to make this argument. Bakhshi was forced to falsely “admit” to working with other activists whom the documentary portrayed as radical leftists.

Gholian’s forced confession appeared shortly after Bakhshi’s. She wore a conservative black chador, though her face was not blurred. She attributed her participation in the Haft Tappeh protests to her “Marxist political beliefs.” She said, likely under duress, that she prepared and sent a video to a friend in Turkey who worked for Amad News, an organization she described as seeking regime change in Iran. Amad News, founded by Iranian dissident Rouhallah Zam, is a news organization that reports on corruption and protests in Iran. At the end of her forced confession, Gholian also said she sent anti-regime materials to an individual affiliated with Tavaana, a civil society organization based in Washington, DC.

A day after the IRIB broadcast, the two activists were arrested again. Amnesty International called for their release, characterizing the arrests as “part of a sinister attempt to silence and punish them for speaking out about the horrific abuse they suffered in custody.”

Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran, presided by Judge Mohammad Moghiseh, conducted the trials of Bakhshi and Gholian in August 2019. Gholian and her attorney, Jamal Heydari Manesh, said her interrogators were abusive and coerced her into confessing in front of a camera. Judge Moghiseh nevertheless sentenced Bakhshi to 74 lashes and 14 years in prison on September 7, 2019. During a separate hearing on the same day, Gholian was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The charges against Bakhshi and Gholian include “assembly and collusion aimed to act against national security,” “propaganda against the state,” “spreading falsehoods,” and “insulting the Supreme Leader.”

In a March 11, 2019, speech to the UN Human Rights Council, Javaid Rehman, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, called attention to the “ill-treatment in detention” of Bakhshi and Gholian. He called on the regime to “release all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association.”

Gholian’s rapidly compromised health in prison left her bound to a wheelchair, unable to walk. On October 20, 2019, she began a hunger strike. Four days later, independent journalist Shahed Alavi released a recording of Gholian, who states, “My power to bear this is really faltering now… I just want a panel from the judiciary to come and see why it is that I can’t breathe. When my family just comes for a visit something awful happens to them and they’re told not to come again… I want people to know what awful things they’re doing to me in prison.”

On October 25, Amnesty International released a letter demanding that Gholian and Bakhshi be released from prison, citing Gholian’s hunger strike and the audio recording. A day later, Gholian was released for around $120,000 in bail. On October 30, Bakhshi was also released, on $70,000 bail.

Gholian was arrested again on the evening of November 16, 2019, in her father’s home. Days before her arrest, an anonymous individual posted to social media a video of Gholian participating in the nationwide protests against the increase in fuel prices.

On December 25, 2019, Gholian announced via Twitter that she was suing IRIB reporter Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour, who taped Gholian’s forced confession “after hours of physical and psychological torture.” Gholian detailed how Zabihpour gave her and Bakhshi a pre-written script for them to recite on camera. Gholian’s Twitter account was quickly deactivated. BBC Persian journalist Kasra Naji commented on Gholian’s tweets, adding that Zabihpour “doubles as interrogator and enforcer of forced confession in front of camera.”

Gholian was later charged with “disseminating false claims” after tweeting about Zabihpour. On February 9, 2020, Gholian was released on a $43,000 bail.

Screenshots from The Burnt Plot depicting the segments during which Esmail Bakhshi (bottom) and Sepideh Gholian (top) deliver their forced confessions.

Maryam and Matin Amiri

Maryam and Matin Amiri are twin sisters who participated in the “White Wednesday” movement, an online social media campaign against compulsory hijab laws in Iran. The movement was founded in May 2014 by Iranian-born journalist Masih Alinejad. Participating women post pictures or videos of themselves wearing a piece of white clothing, a white hijab, or no hijab at all, along with the hashtag #WhiteWednesday. Maryam and Matin participated in White Wednesday by recording a video of themselves, which Alinejad posted on August 25, 2019. Holding her camera in one hand, one of the Amiri sisters declares in the video, “Our right to freedom, right to choose what we can wear. We won’t let anyone violate our rights…We’ll do this so much that every day will be White Wednesday.”

Maryam and Matin were arrested for recording themselves without wearing a hijab. The exact date of their arrests is unknown.

On August 22, 2019, Fars News released a 14-minute documentary about the Amiri sisters, titled For a Few Dollars. A copy of the broadcast was also uploaded to Aparat. In this segment, the two sisters falsely confessed and called themselves “naïve, dumb, and passive” and “of weak personality” for protesting hijab laws. Each sister was interviewed independently, though the interviewer is neither seen nor heard. They wore black chadors, and their faces were blurred. Likely under duress, the sisters claimed that the hijab itself did not bother them, but they were emulating “films of protestors” and indiscriminately copying “social media and satellite content.”

The film included audio communications between the Amiris and Alinejad. One sister falsely confessed that she was aware that collaborating with Alinejad was “contrary to [moral] values,” but said she did not know she was engaging in criminal behavior.

The segment also indicated that the sisters were both getting divorces and living alone. One of the sisters said she engaged in “illicit relations” outside of her marriage.

At the end of the documentary, white text on a black background appeared: “Any sort of collaboration or collusion with the enemies of the regime towards committing crimes against national or foreign security is criminalized.”

On August 25, 2019, three days after Fars News posted the video, Alinejad announced on Twitter that Maryam and Matin were sentenced to 15 years in prison. Two days later, Alinejad tweeted in Farsi that the sisters “were in solitary confinement and under duress for forced confessions.” Their family and friends have not publicly commented on the arrest and prison sentences.

Screenshots from A Tale of Treason. The individuals on the top and bottom left are Maryam and Matin Amiri, and the uncensored photo on the bottom right is of Masih Alinejad.

Saeed Malekpour

Saeed Malekpour was born in Iran in 1975. In 2004, he and his then-wife, Farima Eftekhari, emigrated from Iran to Canada, where he worked as a web designer and computer programmer.

Before traveling to Iran in 2008 to visit his gravely ill father, Malekpour was pursuing Canadian citizenship. He had successfully secured Canadian permanent residency, which officially protected him under Canada’s Charter of Rights (with a few exceptions, such as the right to vote).

On October 4, 2008, Malekpour walked to a dentist appointment in Tehran. Claiming to be armed, a man who did not identify himself asked Malekpour for his ID. Malekpour promptly handed over his passport, which the unidentified man said was a fake. Agents of Iran’s MOI then grabbed Malekpour, blindfolded and handcuffed him, and shoved him into a car. Agents of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization took Malekpour to Evin Prison and severely beat him for days.

According to a report from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Malekpour was immediately subjected to solitary confinement and denied contact with the outside world. The brutal beatings continued. IRGC agents kicked him in the face and beat him with cables and batons, sometimes until he passed out. IRGC agents broke his jaw and knocked out his teeth. At one point, half of his body became paralyzed.

Malekpour also suffered a heart attack but was denied sufficient medical treatment. When he did arrive blindfolded at a hospital, the doctors simply told him to get more sleep; they did not treat his heart, paralysis, broken bones, or concussion symptoms.

Malekpour later said IRGC agents threatened to arrest his wife. Fearing for her safety, Malekpour complied with his captors and made a false confession on camera, during which he said the United States and United Kingdom paid him to distribute pornography and corrupt Iranian internet users.

In August 2019, the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that “[t]he purpose of [Malekpour’s] torture was to force a false confession, which was used to convict Mr. Malekpour of a capital offense.” The regime did not deny that Saeed’s scripted, false confession on television was a result of “physical and psychological torture and ill-treatments.”

Iranian authorities used his forced confession to justify his guilty verdicts and sentencing. The forced confession was the only piece of evidence presented during Malekpour’s first trial, in December 2010, and his retrial, in November 2011. Both resulted in a death sentence.

In August 2013, following international condemnation, the courts commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, claiming that Malekpour appeared remorseful. Six years later, Malekpour was granted a three-day furlough. Fearing the continuation of torture, he told his sister, Maryam, “I’d rather die than go back.”

Maryam helped him escape. She worked with the Canada-based Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, headed by Irwin Cotler, to expedite Malekpour’s Canadian documents. Lying to his own mother and the Iranian government about traveling to northern Iran to visit family, Malekpour trekked over 1,200 miles alone with just a backpack and some cash. He successfully crossed into Turkey, where his sister was waiting for him.

On August 2, 2019, they landed in Vancouver. A day later, Maryam Malekpour posted a video of herself and her brother with the caption, “The nightmare is finally over. He is back home and reunited with his sister. Thank you Canada for your leadership.”

Malekpour finally received medical treatment for his decade of torture at the hands of the IRGC. He spoke publicly about his treatment in Iranian prisons and his daring escape to freedom. Though Malekpour’s story unfolded prior to the appointment of Abdulali Ali-Asgari in 2016, Malekpour is one of the few political prisoners who escaped from jail and was willing to divulge publicly the details of his experience.

Sadly, Canada has not held Iran accountable for Malekpour’s unjust arrest, torture, and prolonged imprisonment. The Canadian government expedited Malekpour’s papers to help him escape Iran and reenter Canada. Yet Canada has not sanctioned under its Global Magnitsky laws the individuals or entities responsible for his abuse or taken other legal measures against the regime.

Screenshot of a BBC Persian report from 2011 on Saeed Malekpour. The BBC program aired portions of Malekpour’s forced confession.