Kurdish Sunni cleric Seyyed Seyfollah Hosseini, who was arrested after the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) raided his home in Javanrud, Kermanshah province, on 13 December 2022, remains in solitary confinement at Hamedan Central Prison, in western Iran.
Hosseini is the imam of the Khatam-al Anbiya Mosque and a member of the board of directors of the Kurdistan Quran School in Javanrud.
The cleric, who suffers from heart disease, has been denied access to medical care since his arrest.
“On the night of 13 December, agents of the IRGC intelligence organisation raided Seyfollah Hosseini’s family home and arrested him after breaking the door and windows of his house. The cleric’s wife Khatoun Ghaderi was also beaten by security forces and injured in her hand”, said a source in an interview with the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN).
The source added that the IRGC intelligence agents transferred the cleric to the military-security agency’s detention facility in Kermanshah and, after about two weeks of interrogation, transferred him to solitary confinement at Hamedan Central Prison.
According to this source, Hosseini was held in a cold cell without heating facilities for nearly 40 days.
After repeated appeals by the cleric and his family, he was transferred to another cell in the past few weeks, and prison authorities continue to refuse to transfer him to the general ward of the prison.
The Special Clerical Court of Hamedan sentenced Hosseini to a total of 16 years in prison, 74 lashes, and two years of living in exile in Ardabil, in north-western Iran.
The court also stripped Hosseini of his clerical status.
The charges brought against the Kurdish Sunni cleric are “acting against national security” for his membership in the religious movement of the Kurdistan Quran School, “propaganda against the state”, “disrupting public order”, “inciting people to disrupt the security of the country” and “insulting the founder and leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Hosseini has been arrested and imprisoned seven times by security agencies.
