News

Long hailed as the intellectual mastermind of the reformist movement, he is today physically frail thanks to a failed assassination attempt nine years ago ordered, in all probability, by the same hardline zealots who plotted the recent election buffoonery. Hajarian is confined to a wheelchair and able to speak only with great difficulty, having suffered severe spinal cord damage [but]...Hajarian's captors fear his brain. They are trying to force him to sign a confession owning up to plotting a "colourful" or velvet revolution that would have seen the Islamic republic toppled and replaced by a pro-western puppet government... But Hajjarian—himself one of the principal founders and architects of the intelligence ministry in his younger days – has turned the tables by refusing to leave prison. He has refused to give any admission, even when his jailers tried to break his resolve by interrogating his wife and detaining – though later releasing – his son. Effectively, the prisoner is holding his captors hostage…It is an irony and humiliation Iran's spooks could have avoided...[because] Hajarian thought the idea of a velvet revolution of the sort that occurred in former Soviet republics, or that toppled communism in eastern Europe, absurdly out of place in Iran.