The 29 year old activist, was beaten and interrogated during her agonising years behind bars. She was forced to listen from solitary confinement as female inmates were raped, as well as made to watch male guards beat and electrocute her brother Farzad, while they demanded that she tell them about opposition group the People’s Mojaheidn Organisation of Iran (MEK).
This brother and sister were charged by Intelligence authorities for speaking out against Iran’s regime. Ms. Madadzadeh arrested in 2009 on her way to Tehran’s Tarbiat Moalem University where she studied computer science.
Once release from solitary confinement, Ms. Madadzadeh sent letters to Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, from the secrecy of her cell, to draw attention to prison brutality.
She refused to speak during interrogations, which wet on for eight to ten hours every day, following which, she found herself subject to increasingly violent and lengthy interrogations. She said, “They pushed me and they hit me a lot. They grabbed my hair and pushed my head and wanted me to say what they wanted to hear. They tortured my brother in front of my eyes.”
Further she says, “They increased the pressure and even more in the interrogation they said they would kill me and threatened to execute me. Nobody knew where I was, I was alone and I heard the sounds of other prisoners being tortured. They would cry out and it was the most horrible sound.” She claims other female prisoners were being raped by guards and routinely sexually assaulted.
Ms. Madadzadeh was released at the end of her sentence, and fled the country, evading intelligence and surveillance teams.
She now urges Western governments to stand against Iran and its President Hassan Rouhani and to back the National Council of Resistance of Iran which works alongside the MEK. She said, “The West cannot negotiate with the regime. It’s the most criminal in the world. The face of the regime is not the smiling faces and shaking of hands.”
She says, further, “My message to European leaders is stop negotiating with the regime. The number of executions is increasing.” Executions last year are estimated at somewhere between 966 to 1,025 people, the highest number in a decade, with 170 recorded executions in the first six months of 2016.
Speaking to the European Parliament, Ms. Madadzadeh, said, “During my five year imprisonment I witnessed numerous crimes of this regime particularly against Iran’s innocent women and girls and today I am here to be the voice of the voiceless, the voice of those being crushed in the clutches of this misogynist regime in face of the world’s silence and inaction.” She added, “The message of the Iranian people to western governments, and my message today is that you must adhere to the three decades of struggle by the Iranian people to break free from the clutches of this regime and accept the true freedom fighters, the National Council of Resistance of Iran as the true representative of the Iranian people, and refrain from any type of negotiations or deals with this notorious regime, because the true price of your deals is human lives, gallows in the streets of Iran. This is a reality which I learned and felt in the university, in the prison and after my release in Iranian society. They have the desire and potential to bring about change in Iran. The Iranian people have the will power to overthrow this regime, and with the tireless efforts of the Iranian resistance they will overthrow this regime.”
