Iran: Security forces cover up death by torture of a young Kurd

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) was shocked to learn yesterday of the death of Ibrahim Lutfullahi, a Kurdish student from the Kurdish province of Kordestan. He died in the middle of January in the Kurdish-Iranian town of Sanandaj after being arrested on 6th January by the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) on the way home from university. „His family assumes that he was tortured to death in custody”, said Kamal Sido, Near-east correspondent of the GfbV.

The exact time of his death is unknown. On 15th January the parents received a message from an office of the Ministry for the Secret Service (MOIS) in Sanandaj that they should collect the corpse of their son. But then the body was buried before the parents arrived so that signs of torture could no longer be proved. „This behaviour is in cases in which the real cause of death is to be held back by the Pasdaran from the parents of the prisoner no rarity”, said Sido.

Background information:

In the state of Iran, which is peopled by many ethnic groups, there live apart from Persians, also Aseri, Kurds, Arabs, Beluchi, Turkmens, Assyro-Aramaeans and other smaller ethnic and religious minorities. The non-Persians make up much more than half of the total population. As independent peoples with their own languages, cultures and history they are not recognized, but deliberately termed „ethnic groups”. They all suffer from suppression and discrimination. The area inhabited by the Kurds in Iran covers the four provinces of Kermanshah, Llam, Western Aserbaidjan and Kurdistan in the west of the country and has with its 10 million inhabitants a total area of 125,000 sq.km. Nearly 98% of the Kurds in Iran see themselves as Muslims. 75% of them are Sunnis and 25% Shiites. Human rights, democracy and regional self-government for the Kurds in a democratic federal Iran – that is the declared aim of the Kurdish political parties in Iran.

The Pasdaran, known as the Revolutionary Guard of the Islamist Revolution, is an Iranian military organisation, which was founded by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. They became one of the most important institutions of Iran and have the task of combating critics of the Islamist Republic at home and abroad. They also commit political murders in Europe. In this way Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, head of the Democratic party of Kurdistan, was killed by their members or at their behest on 13th July 1989 in Vienna. The so-called Mykonos attack of 17th September 1992, in which four Kurdish-Iranian exile politicians were killed, is presumed to have been carried out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.