A student and political activist from Iran who was recently released from custody revealed that female inmates were being forced to take medication that sedated them.
Leila Hosseinzadeh, 31, who was detained in the Adel Abad prison in the city of Shiraz, in Fars Province, in south-western Iran, said the sedative pills were given in order to control behaviour and added: “A horrific crime is being committed against ordinary prisoners.”
The young woman was arrested a total of four times ever since she was first seized in December 2016.
Following her first arrest Hosseinzadeh, who is a master’s student in anthropology at Tehran University, a political activist, and the former secretary of the central union council of Tehran University students was again arrested in 2018.
She was then sentenced to two years and six months behind bars, but was released from Teheran’s notorious Evin prison early in 2019, after a doctor exempted her from imprisonment.
The examiner’s medical certificate said that Leila could not be imprisoned without a serious risk to her life because she suffers from Crohn’s disease.
But despite this, Leila was then arrested for the third time in 2021 in Shiraz before being released after 26 days.
Her latest stint in jail reportedly started after Leila was beaten and arrested by security forces in front of her home on 20th August 2022.
She was reportedly one of more than 18,000 Iranians who were detained in connection with the antigovernmental protests that have swept Iran over the past four months.
But after spending five months in the Adel Abad prison in the southern city of Shiraz, she was finally released on bail in January 2023.
In a series of posts on Twitter on Sunday, (15th January), she criticised the health conditions in the women’s ward and called them a complete ‘disaster’.
Leila explained: “A diabetic prisoner had a leg wound that was widening, and the answer to her was, ‘it’s normal.’
“People with HIV or hepatitis were left on their own without receiving any treatment.
“I requested a hepatitis test many times, and they did not do it.”
She then claimed that prison authorities gave inmates sedative pills in order to control behaviour and added: “The treatment of the prisoners by some guards absolutely goes against human dignity.
“For example, I was standing in the line at the store when I heard… a prison guard addressing a prisoner who was kept in solitary confinement, ‘Fall on your knees at the feet of my colleague, kiss her feet, scream, and I can get you out of solitary confinement.”
In addition she revealed that the prisoners were forced to wash their dishes in the bathroom and that there were strange noises coming from the prison basement on a daily basis.
Leila said: “I don’t know if this basement was where sentenced people are being kept. It was also rumored that political prisoners are beaten there.
“Everything is forbidden there. Cutting hair, cigarettes, chewing gum, caffeinated products, tattoos.
“Prisoner were teaching each other English, [but] that is also forbidden now.”
