Intelligence offices in various cities of Iranian Kurdistan have been summoning family members of some Kurdish political party members and threatening them to sign a letter addressed to the UN claiming the “abduction” of the party members, sources told the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN).
In the past few weeks, families have been summoned to the intelligence offices of Orumiyeh, Sanandaj, Marivan, Kamyaran, and Kermanshah. Plain clothes agents, who have introduced themselves as members of a special judiciary commission, have asked them to sign complaints against Kurdish parties.
“The agents have pressed and threatened families, demanding they sign a letter in English addressed to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, alleging that their children had been abducted by Kurdish opposition parties”, said a source.
The agents have threatened the families that they could be arrested and prosecuted if they did not sign the letter. As a result, some families have been forced to conduct television interviews in addition to signing the “complaints”.
Reportedly, some of those summoned are the families of a number of Kurdish opposition party members who have been killed in clashes with Iranian and Turkish forces in recent years.
In the past few years, the Intelligence Office and the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in various cities of Kurdistan have been summoning and interrogating the families of the political activists residing abroad in order to force them to stop their political activities and return to Iran.
The crackdown comes as at least 10 political activists and former members of Kurdish opposition parties are currently detained and sentenced to long prison terms after returning to Iran, despite coordinating their return with security agencies and having a “safe conduct”.
