He has been held since 17 January at Lakan Prison in Rashat where he has been denied the right to see a lawyer and bail has been set at 200 million rials (around 20,000 euros).
The authorities have put pressure on his mother to deny that her son has been arrested. Free Internet Press
Iran has been cracking down hard on bloggers:
Nearly 20 people have been arrested over the past three months in a crackdown against the online press. Apart from Sigarchi, another weblogger, Mojtaba Saminejad, is still in prison.
At the start of January, Tehran's prosecutor-general, Said Mortazavi, ordered Internet Service Providers to block the main weblogs - Orkut, Nedstat, Blogspot, Persianblog, Blogrolling and others. Iranian Internet-users are now almost entirely cut off from the blogsphere.Free Internet Press
Sigarchi -- who was imprisoned last fall for writing an article "illustrated with photographs, of a rally in Tehran by families of prisoners who were executed in 1989" -- is a noted print journalist as well:
Sigarchi is the editor of the daily Gylan Emroz. A few days before his arrest he was interviewed by two foreign radio stations, the BBC World Service [I cannot find any link at BBC to this interview.] and Radio Farda.
Free Internet Press
Note: I checked the Web log of another contributor to the daily Gylan Emroz -- Emad Baghi -- and it appears not to have been updated since last October. I cannot find a link to the newspaper itself.
Sigarchi has for nearly three years run a political and cultural weblog
www.sigarchi.com/blog [see screenshot below], in which he mounted repeated criticism of the regime. He had
condemned harassment of journalists arrested in a series of Internet cases and in particular the mistreatment inflicted on his colleagues Shahram Rafihzadeh and Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi. The authorities have made his blog
inaccessible within Iran.
Here's a screenshot of the cultural Web site that Sigarchi has maintained for three years:
Update [2005-1-21 14:32:5 by SusanHu]: And here's how torture is used to obtain "forced confessions" from bloggers and other "political prisoners in the Islamic Regime" -- and, below this, see another shocking report (NEW]:
... the "obtained"
confessions of a group of bloggers and activists have shocked Iranians. The question in everyone's mind is, how is it possible that someone can confess and even thank the inquisitors of a judiciary system that have violated and abuse them?
The bloggers, as Human Rights Watch stated, were put under relentless and vicious pressure by the inquisitors to confess; after their release, the bloggers expounded on their de facto stories to friends and fellow activists to illustrate the judiciary's fabrication of said confessions.
The bloggers described the kind of treatment they were subjected to, after their release and during subsequent private gatherings of activists. They described their ordeal after their arrests where after being beaten and pummeled, they were dragged out into the open air, stripped and completely naked while the inquisitors and torturers poured ice water on them and then again, dragged back inside and stuck next to heaters and radiators.
This was done repeatedly in order to induce physical and nervous shock. This would trigger tremors and lockjaw that would then render the detainees unconscious.
Iran Press News, Jan. 4, 2005
From
Reporters Without Borders, Oct. 29 -
Reporters Without Borders today deplored the arrest of Iranian journalist Fereshteh Ghazi, of the daily Etemad ("Confidence"), for working with reformist Internet news websites and expressed alarm at reports that the intelligence services were
preparing to accuse her and five other imprisoned journalists of "adultery" in a bid to hide the political nature of their detention…
The five other imprisoned journalists - Javad Gholam Tamayomi, Omid Memarian, Shahram Rafihzadeh, Hanif Mazroi and Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi - are expected to be accused of having sex with her. Some of them are said to have been forced to sign confessions. Such accusations by the authorities are common against political prisoners in Iran. Holy Crime, crime of clergy, clergical crime, ... (The site includes disturbing photos of whippings and hangings, and numerous, numerous stories of hangings condemned by the European Parliament.)
The RSF site has a
list of 71 cyberdissidents arrested and imprisoned.
RSF is seeking to honor "outstanding examples of blogs defending free expression from which a shortlist will be compiled for an online vote to choose the best."
Kossacks, if you know of any blogs that meet the criteria, please nominate them.
Additional action you can take: Become a member and/or sign RSF's petitions.
(All emphases mine.)
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