Self-Sacrifice by Struan Stevenson Read Free Book Online

swollen as a result of torture. Surgeons had removed the skin from her leg to mend her feet. She was from the city of Qazvin and told me that her brother had been executed. “They wanted me to divulge information and whipped me relentlessly on the soles of my feet, shredding them to pieces. Eventually they realised that I could tell them nothing, so they operated on my feet to mend them too.”
    Later I noticed that Maryam had been taken for interrogation again. Peeking from under her blindfold she recognized one of the people being interrogated. But half an hour later they took her out again and she disappeared for two weeks. When she returned, she could only walk on her knees. She asked for a copy of the
Koran
and lay down next to the wall, put the
Koran
on her chest and told mewhat had happened. Her feet were shattered. This continued for a whole week. Since she could not stand they tied her in order to hold her upright so they could continue torturing her. After telling us this she said, “leave me alone”. At 5 am they opened the door of our cell for prayers and she was unable to get up. We went to prayers, but when we returned we realised she was dead. The Guards forced us to stand next to the wall until her body was taken away.
    Another woman named Razieh Ayatollahzadeh Shirazi, a student who had joined the PMOI during the Shah’s time, was pregnant and had been tortured. In Ward 311 there used to be a bakery, the heat from which transferred to the floor of the prison. She said the heat would eventually kill her baby. Three weeks later, her baby died. She said the baby’s death was the price we pay for freedom. Her husband had already been executed. In 1985 she was executed too.
    I got to know a 45-year-old mother named Rezvan Rafipoor in Ward 240. She was tortured every three weeks in order to extract information from her about her daughter. The severe beatings had left horrible bruises on her body. She was then taken to “the dormitory”, a special ward for political prisoners. After experiencing that ward, she was so distraught that she said it was impossible for her to reestablish contact with other people. When her cellmates were asleep, she got a rope, placed a bucket under her feet and hanged herself. One of my friends found her and screamed. The guards cut her down but it was too late.
    I was pregnant when I was imprisoned. They even forbade me from giving birth at a regular hospital. My baby spent one year in prison with me and then was looked after by my parents. When I was freed after three and a half years, I fled with my baby to Iraq and joined the resistance in Ashraf.’

 
    9
    Strasbourg
    In the autumn of 2004 we decided to arrange for Mrs Rajavi, in her capacity as President-elect of the NCRI, to come to the European Parliament to address a meeting of the all-party Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (FoFI), which I co-chaired with Paulo Casaca, a Socialist MEP from Portugal and a close friend. Together we had set up FoFI for the purpose of backing the restoration of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, women’s rights, the abolition of the death penalty and the abolition of nuclear weapons in Iran. On behalf of FoFI we had both travelled widely throughout the Middle East, Europe and the US in pursuit of our objective of having the PMOI taken off the various terror lists. Indeed we went to the United States on many occasions, to the Congress and the Senate. Paulo Casaca, Alejo Vidal-Quadras and other colleagues also on several occasions travelled to Iraq to visit Camp Ashraf, where at that time over 3,400 key frontline members of the PMOI were stuck as defenceless refugees under the fragile security of the occupying US military forces. These refugees were under constant threat of attack or eviction.
    Paulo and I met many obstacles during our campaign. We were vilified in the media by Iranian intelligence with spurious press articles, accusing us of being ‘friends of terrorists’. Obscure