The daughter of a human rights lawyer held in a prison located in an area targeted by Israeli missile strikes has begged for his release.
Mehraveh Khandan’s father, 60-year-old Reza Khandan, has been in Evin prison since December, serving a sentence of four years and one month for charges of “assembly and collusion” and “propaganda against the regime” for producing pins opposing the mandatory wearing of the hijab.
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The prison is located in Tehran‘s district 3, which is subject to an evacuation order issued by Israel on Monday due to its military targeting the area with missile and drone strikes.
After Donald Trump said the city should be evacuated “immediately”, Mehraveh, 25, shared a tearful video on Instagram, asking: “How can he leave Tehran, he is in prison?”
This is “one of the most helpless and hopeless times of my life”, Mehraveh told Sky News.
She said she was imagining her father sitting in prison and hearing the explosions nearby, without having a reliable source of information to find out what was going on, as he is only allowed access to information via Iranian state media.
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Mehraveh, who managed to speak to her father on the phone since, said he told her the explosions “reminded him of the Iran-Iraq war when he was a soldier”.
“I can imagine he was [scared],” she added after last talking to him on Wednesday morning.
Mehraveh said she posted her video plea because it was “the only way we could raise our voice above the deafening noise of criminal rulers endlessly hurling taunts at each other”.
She hopes that pressure from the international community could force Iranian authorities to release her father, as permitted under Iran’s wartime law.
“The Islamic Republic regime has shown in times of crisis, it only resorts to increasing internal repression, but I hope this time they react to international pressure differently,” Mehraveh said.
Reza, along with other inmates in Evin prison, also wrote a letter to the authorities to ask for their release, saying that the prison lacked shelters and alarms to protect against missile and drone attacks.
“Not releasing them from prison is putting their lives in danger,” Mehraveh said.
Knowing her father is being held in a place so vulnerable to strikes was bringing her “a lot of anxiety, sleep-related issues and trouble eating”, she explained.
“Although I live in a safe environment, I feel captured and trapped most of the time,” said Mehraveh, who is currently in Amsterdam studying fine arts.
Her mother, Nasrin Sotoudeh, 62, who is also a prominent human rights lawyer, was facing a lot of stress as she was trying to get her husband released.
Their daughter is also “so worried” for her younger brother Nima, 17, who fled Tehran with Nasrin to escape the Israeli attacks.
Neither Mehraveh nor her mother have been able to visit Reza in prison, and the one time Nima was allowed to, the teenager was “traumatised” after being “beaten by guards”.
Mehraveh said she doesn’t think Iran would “disappear” her father right now, like what allegedly happened to a fellow Evin prisoner this week, but worries that his contact with the outside world, currently via limited calls within Iran, could be cut off by the prison.
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Reza had previously gone on hunger strikes to protest the arrests of political prisoners and the conditions at Evin prison, the same jail where British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held. Mehraveh said there is a bedbug infestation and a general lack of hygiene.
“My father is also struggling with health issues, and his hospital transfer appointments have been cancelled repeatedly at the last minute because my father refuses to be handcuffed and wear the prison uniform,” Mehraveh said.
