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Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran, Jul. 30 – A human rights
lawyer representing the family of slain Iranian-Canadian photojournalist
Zahra Kazemi turned up unexpectedly at the Tehran
Bar Association on Saturday and began an indefinite sit-in, after police
raided his home and tried to arrest him.
Abdolfattah Soltani’s
troubles began when he publicly accused Tehran’s Revolutionary Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi on Monday of
involvement in the July 2003 murder of Zahra Kazemi,
who was killed in Evin Prison after being
arrested while taking photographs of families of political prisoners
outside Tehran’s notorious jail.
Police and agents of the capital’s public prosecutor’s office raided Soltani’s home on Wednesday, after the powerful Mortazavi issued a warrant for his arrest.
Soltani’s lawyer, Farideh
Gheyrat, said the arrest warrant was illegal, as
“it came out of the blue, with no prior notification or summoning of my
client”.
“This morning, my client wrote a letter to Judiciary Chief [Mahmoud Shahroudi], in which
he said that he would continue his sit-in protest inside the Tehran Bar
Association until the reasons for the aggression of agents of the
prosecutor’s office on his private home and his arrest warrant by the
Tehran Prosecutor’s office are announced”, the state-run ILNA news agency
quoted Gheyrat as saying.
Photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured and
raped while in detention, according to a former Iranian military doctor who
had examined Kazemi at a Revolutionary Guards
hospital, where she was taken after losing consciousness in Evin Prison.
Prosecutor Mortazavi himself has been implicated
in her murder and a French newspaper quoted sources in Tehran as saying that Kazemi died of blows to her head by Mortazavi.
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