Attack in Sine Prison: 20 prisoners, including Panahi, injured Guards attacked prisoners in Sine (Sanandaj) Prison where inmates including Ramin Hossein Panahi got injured.

Attack in Sine Prison: 20 prisoners, including Panahi, injured
Guards attacked prisoners in Sine (Sanandaj) Prison where inmates including Ramin Hossein Panahi got injured.

According to reports, guards in the central Sine (Sanandaj) Prison attacked prisoners in order to take Ramin Hossein Panahi away on June 15. The prisoners, however, resisted and 20 of them got injured, including Panahi and his cell-mate Haidar Qurbani.

Zamaneh radio reported that clashes in prison lasted till June 17 morning and the prison still remains on alert.

A few weeks ago, lawyer of Kurdish political prisoner Ramin Hossein Panahi was told that the Higher Court has rejected to review the case. Panahi’s family was then informed that their son would be hanged after the Ramadan month.

Ramin Hossein Panahi, a 22-year-old man from Iran’s Kurdish minority, was convicted and sentenced to death after a grossly unfair trial on 16 January that lasted less than an hour. His family told Amnesty International that he appeared before the Revolutionary Court in Sanandaj with torture marks on his body, but that the court failed to order an investigation into his claims that he had been forced to “confess” to the crime. According to his lawyer, the court convicted and sentenced him to death for “taking up arms against the state” (baqi) merely based on his membership of the banned Kurdish opposition group Komala. No specific evidence was provided linking him to activities involving intentional killing, which is the required threshold defining the “most serious crimes” to which the use of the death penalty must be restricted under international law. Between his arrest and trial, he was allowed one brief meeting with his lawyer, which took place with intelligence officials present. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and death sentence in March 2018.

Ramin Hossein Panahi was first arrested on 23 June 2017. Following his arrest, he was forcibly disappeared for four months. According to him, during this period and a further two months of solitary confinement, Ministry of Intelligence and Revolutionary Guard officials repeatedly tortured him, including through beating him with cables, kicking and punching him in the stomach and hitting his head against the wall. They also deliberately denied him adequate medical care for the injuries he sustained from being shot at the time of his arrest.

anf