Furious protests erupted in Iran last month, amid public backlash over a catalogue of regime failures. Iranian dissidents took to the streets of Tehran and other cities such as Isfahan to vent anti-government outrage as the authorities admitted they had “unintentionally” shot down a Ukrainian International Airlines passenger plane. Some of the protesters were heard shouting slogans against the country’s leadership such as “death to the dictator”.
Many of the protesters were university graduates like Reza Amiri who grew up in a middle-class family in Tehran.
The 32-year-old Iran activist, who is speaking out from an undisclosed location in Europe after fleeing the region, was arrested during anti-regime uprisings in 2018 and given a 20-year prison sentence for supporting the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK) – delisted as a terrorist group by the US in 2012 and by the EU in 2009.
Mr Amiri was arrested in mid-2018 and was moved to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is currently being held.
Of his brutal treatment, Mr Amiri said: “A variety of methods, including forced insomnia or lack of food, threats and insults, as well as blindfolding and deprivation of basic needs were used to break me.”
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Mr Amiri says he was kept in solitary confinement within a six-foot square stone cell in Evin jail where his only human interaction was with the interrogators who tortured him to discover other names in his network.
Conditions in the squalid hellhole are believed to be so depraved US Treasury Secretary Steven T Mnuchin is among international officials to accuse the government of human rights abuses.
Isolation drives many Evin inmates insane, with blood-curdling screams of other captives a constant source of psychological torment, Mr Amiri explained.
He said: “One painful psychological torture I faced was the constant screams of other prisoners who had lost their mental balance.”
Despite Iran rejecting accusations of human rights abuses in the prison as “untrue” and “politically motivated”, according to official news agency PressTV, Mr Amiri claimed the crimes of the Iranian regime know no bounds.
He said: “The crimes of the regime are limitless, but I know that we should pay the price for achieving freedom.
“Since I chose this path with full awareness, I have no fear of my own and my family and relatives’ safety.”
Evin’s prison guards have also been accused of torturing and killing people in custody. In 2003, a Canadian Iranian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, died of “brain haemorrhage resulting from beatings” after being detained for taking pictures of the prison.
There are also reports of inmates being electrocuted and raped.
Several female prisoners say interrogators have used rape as a method of torture — and have done so for decades.
Marina Nemat, imprisoned in Evin when she was just 16 years old in 1986, wrote on Sky News: “I was being raped over and over again in solitary confinement in Evin at the age of 17, and it was absolutely legal. I couldn’t even complain about it.
“The conditions in Evin Prison have not changed a great deal since I was there in the 80s.
“Torture and sexual abuse are still widely used.
“I have campaigned for the release of many Evin prisoners. Some of them have been released, but others are still there.”
Farzad Madadzadeh, detained in Evin for almost a year claimed he was electrocuted and beaten by guards for 16 hours a day.
He told MailOnline: “You are subjected to all kinds of torture — psychological and physical. Constant interrogation, constant beating around the clock.
“At any moment you wait for something to happen — a new torture session or a death sentence.
“You are totally isolated from the rest of the world. The only voice you hear is the voice of death.”