Iran Rejects Family’s Charge That Protester Was Tortured
New York Times / Nazila Fathi
15-Feb-2010

The prosecutor general in Tehran on Monday dismissed accusations by the wife of an opposition leader who said her son was arrested and tortured while in detention, the semiofficial ILNA news agency reported.

Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, the prosecutor, said that Ali Karroubi, the son of Fatimeh Karroubi and her husband, the opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi, was not arrested on Thursday during an antigovernment protest, the news agency reported.

His comments came after Mrs. Karroubi, a former member of Parliament, publicized a letter she wrote to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about how her son, Ali, 37, was tortured and threatened with rape during his brief detention.

The denial came Monday, during a review at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, after Iran challenged Western powers’ accusations of bloody repression since the disputed June 12 elections.

The letter appeared to be another public revelation of torture charges against the government since Mehdi Karroubi disclosed in a letter made public in August that detainees had been tortured and raped in prison.

Mr. Jafari Dolatabadi said that Ali Karroubi needed to provide evidence that he had been detained and where he was taken. “Based on our inquiries from the security forces, the Revolutionary Guards and the intelligence ministry, this person was not arrested at all,” he said.

Mrs. Karroubi wrote in her letter that her son was taken to a... >>>

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