“Our silence did not protect him”: daughter advocates father in the death cell in Iran | Iran

IAt the end of October 2022, when the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini swelled in police custody in Iran, Rezgar Beiigzadeh Babamiri, a triple father, through the alleys in the city of Bukan in Westiran, treated medical care in secretion clinics in which doctors were injured in defiance in the state.

Many of the wounded were too afraid to seek hospital care after reports from secret police officers who patroyed stations, interviewed patients and imprisoned injured demonstrators. Babamiri, a 47-year-old fruit and vegetable builder, did not see himself as a revolutionary, but simply as someone who did the right thing, says his daughter Zhino.

“There were intensive shot of the forces and many demonstrators were injured. Everyone helped each other and he volunteered,” she says.

“I told him that he shouldn't talk openly about it on the phone, but he said it was not dangerous to help injured people. He just couldn't see how young people bleed on the streets.”

Babamiri was arrested in April 2023 and interviewed by the Ministry of Secret Service in Bukan. According to Zhino, 24, initially believed that it was a short survey. “I was told [by relatives] Don't worry and that he would be home soon, ”she says.

Instead, he disappeared into solitary confinement and was initially denied access to a lawyer or contact with his family, according to the Kurdish human rights network.

Last week, the family heard from a lawyer that Babamiri had been sentenced to death together with four other Kurdish men after being accused of “an armed group” and “espionage for Israel” after being accused of “armed uprising”.

Zhino, who lives in exile in Norway, says that the family was horrified by the judgment. “When I heard about the death sentence, I was deaf. When I called my grandmother and my aunt, they cried loudly. I have never heard of it.”

Since his arrest, Zhino has said that several people have fulfilled stories about how their father saved their lives.

“These charges were invented. My father is a simple farmer who loves the people of his community and his family. He is a man who loves poems, likes to watch news and like to train,” she says.

In July 2024, the Iranian state media together with other men who were charged with the same case triggered a video that Babamiri stood. Human rights groups say that his conviction was based on a forced confession.

In a letter that was later smuggled out of prison to the family, Babamiri described torture for more than four months, including waterboarding, electrical shocks, false versions and strokes, some of which made him numb.

“When I read the letter for the first time, I skipped the parts through torture. I couldn't see what they did to him,” says Zhino.

According to Amnesty International, Babamiri's arrest in 2023 during a wave of detention and executions by students and activists according to the protests from 2022, part of the Iranian regime campaign to enable fear and maintenance of control.

Amnesty has also repeatedly documented the arbitrary arrest and detention of Kurds by the regime – an ethnic minority in Iran – based on perceived affiliations for opposition groups, often without credible evidence.

“My father and the others pay the price that he was simply born Kurdish,” says Zhino. “They told him that nobody would be interested if he died and that he would end up in a mass grave.”

Zhino says that members of her family who are still living in Iran are anxious and that they were advised by the well -wishers to remain calm after his arrest. “I regret that. The silence did not protect him and it almost broke me,” she says.

She is a pronounced activist, co -founder of daughters of the judiciary, a group of Iranians who fought to save her detained fathers.

In her last call with her father, he couldn't hear her. “He kept saying: 'Zhino, are you there?' I could hear him, but I couldn't hear this moment. “

She is now waiting for news about his fate every day. “I'm afraid to check my phone,” she says. “I'm afraid that I will wake up to read my father's name [on the death list]. “”