Iran Denies Allegations That Protesters Were Raped in Prison

          
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          August 13, 2009
          Iran Denies Allegations That Protesters Were Raped in
          Prison
          By ROBERT F. WORTH
          BEIRUT, Lebanon — The speaker of Iran's Parliament, Mi Larijani , vehemently denied Wednesday that
          some male and female protesters arrested in the wake of Iran's disputed presidential election were sexually
          abused in prison.
          The accusations of prison rape , first broached by the reformist cleric and presidential candidate Mehdi
          Karroubi, shocked many Iranians and prompted Mr. Larijani to assign a special parliamentary committee
          last weekend to investigate.
          The accusations have deepened divisions among conservatives and distracted attention from the
          government's renewed efforts to silence Iran's still defiant opposition through a mass trial of reformist
          figures. Prosecutors have tried to cast the entire opposition movement as a foreign-inspired effort to
          provoke a “velvet” revolution in Iran.
          Mr. Larijani dismissed the rape accusations as “sheer lies,” saying the inquiry had found no evidence to
          support them. But opposition Web sites were buzzing with new reports of sexual abuse from victims who
          were too frightened or too ashamed to give their names.
          Government officials recently acknowledged for the first time that some detained protesters were tortured .
          The issue has provoked outrage among many conservatives as well as the opposition, which rejects
          President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election on June 12 as rigged. On Wednesday, some reformist
          Parliament members spoke out against Iran's national police chief, Brig. Gen. Ismail Ahmadi-Moqaddam,
          saying he should be dismissed because of his role in the abuses.
          Conservatives have also called for punishment of those involved in the violence against detainees.
          Parliament assigned a committee to investigate the abuses in July, after it emerged that one of the detainees
          who died in prison — apparently after being tortured — was the son of an adviser to a conservative
          presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezai.
          Those criticisms have exposed fissures not only among conservatives but also among Iran's branches of
          government. On Wednesday, a spokesman for the judiciary defended it against accusations that it had been
          silent during the abuses, in comments to Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency.
          But the spokesman, Ali-Reza Jamshidi, also said the judiciary was not in charge of the detention centers
          where the abuses took place during the postelection crackdown. And on Tuesday, a group of lawyers
          complained that the judiciary's independence was being undermined by elements of the ruling
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          establishment, during a meeting with former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani , the agency reported.
          The rape accusations appear to be more explosive than the prison deaths, touching an issue that may be
          even more sensitive in Iran's Islamic culture than in the West.
          The allegations first emerged on Saturday, in a letter dated July 29 from Mr. Karroubi to Mr. Rafsanjani. In
          his letter, Mr. Karroubi said his information had come from officials “who hold sensitive positions in the
          country,” and spoke of women raped so brutally they suffered serious “genital injuries.”
          He added that the reports were so shocking that “if even one of them is true, it would be a tragedy for the
          Islamic republic,” and that “it would overshadow the sins of many dictatorships including that of the
          deposed shah” of Iran, whose government fell in the 1979 revolution.
          Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from New York.
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