Officials in Orumiyeh Central Prison have transferred Kurdish political prisoner Nayeb Askari to a hospital outside the prison on the third day of his hunger strike on 28 August. They returned him to prison after he underwent an MRI scan.
Askari has temporarily ended his hunger strike after returning to prison.
On 26 August, he went on a hunger strike as a court order had not been issued for his transfer to a hospital outside the prison to undergo the necessary tests.
Askari suffers from kidney stones and should be operated on as soon as possible at the doctor’s discretion.
On 24 March, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested Nayeb Askari in Orumiyeh. He was taken to Orumiyeh Central Prison after three months in detention.
Reportedly, he lived in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for the past several years. And in 2018, during his stay in the Kurdistan region, the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh sentenced him to the death penalty in absentia, charging him with “enmity against God” (Moharebeh) through “membership in the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK)”.
However, the status of this case is still unknown. During Askari’s detention in the Intelligence Organisation of the IRGC, security interrogators informed him that he would face a retrial.
Separately, in early August, a court sentenced Askari and two other Kurdish political prisoners, Keyhan Mokarram and Nayeb Hajizadeh, to 50 lashes and three months in prison.
The sentence came after the head of Orumiyeh Central Prison filed a complaint, accusing the prisoners of “disrupting the prison order” due to their involvement in a fight between several political prisoners and general crime prisoners.
The case was filed following the beating of a Kurdish political prisoner by general crime prisoners.
