Kurdish political prisoner Nayeb Askari, who is on death row, was transferred from the political ward of Orumiyeh Central Prison to ward 3 of the prison on the orders of the Ministry of Intelligence in Orumiyeh.
The Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) has learned that prison officials visited the political ward of the prison today and told Askari that he was not allowed to stay in the ward on the orders of the Ministry of Intelligence.
Despite the prisoner’s objections, he was transferred to ward 3 of the prison, where prisoners in a state of uncertainty are held.
In recent months, pressure from the Ministry of Intelligence on political prisoners in the Orumiyeh Central Prison has increased.
The agency has been summoning and interrogating political prisoners in its office inside the prison, threatening them with exile to prisons in other cities.
Askari was arrested in Orumiyeh on 24 March 2021 by the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
He was sent to Orumiyeh Central Prison after spending three months in the detention facility of the IRGC’s intelligence organisation.
In April 2023, Branch Two of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh sentenced Askari to death on charges of “enmity against God” (moharebeh) through “membership” in the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK).
He was also sentenced to death in absentia by the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumieh in 2018 on the same charge, which after his appeal, was overturned and referred to Branch Two of the Revolutionary Court.
In August 2021, 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 general crime prisoners’ beating of a Kurdish political prisoner.
On 26 July 2021, Askari went on a 32-day hunger strike to protest against the judicial authorities’ failure to issue an order for transferring him to a hospital outside the prison for treatment.
