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Iran: Fifteen Years in Prison, Confiscation of House and Property and Disintegration of a Family on Charges of Supporting the MEK

Iran: Fifteen years in prison, confiscation of house and property and disintegration of a family on charges of supporting the MEK
Hassan Sadeghi and his wife, Fatemeh Muthanna, were arrested along with their two children on January 28, 2013, by the Iranian regime’s security forces in Tehran, at a family ceremony for their father’s funeral.

Hassan Sadeghi and his wife, Fatemeh Mosanna, were arrested along with their two children on January 28, 2013, by the Iranian regime’s security forces in Tehran, at a family ceremony for their father’s funeral. Their daughter was released three days later, and their underage son was released from prison after about a month and a half.

Gholam Hussain Sadeghi, Hassan’s father, was a member of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI-MEK) who passed away in a Baghdad hospital in January 2011. Hassan and Fatemeh lived in Iran and were not politically active. They were arrested solely for holding a funeral for Hassan’s father. Their home and property were confiscated and they were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

On August 19, 2020, Fatemeh Mosanna was sent to Taleghani Hospital in Tehran after her multiple health issues worsened. Mrs. Muthanna was handcuffed to a hospital bed and denied access to her family. Her children traveled to the hospital but were not permitted to see her. Between January 2019 and the present day, Fatemeh has had only three meetings with her husband in Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj.

Fatemeh Mosanna and Hassan Sadeghi were each sentenced to 15 years in prison by Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court by Judge Ahmadzadeh on charges of “moharebeh” or “waging war on God” for supporting the MEK. This so-called court had ordered the confiscation of the family’s property, and the Executive Headquarters of Imam’s Directive confiscated Mr. Sadeghi’s place of business in February 2019. Their house was confiscated in April 2020.

The Executive Headquarters of Imam’s Directive is one of four institutions under the control of the regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, which controls 60 percent of the national wealth.

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Fatemeh Mosanna’s 2013 arrest was not the first of its kind. When she was only 13 years old she was arrested with her mother and both were charged with waging war on God through support for the MEK. Her three brothers were executed in the 1980s on the same charge, as was the wife of one of her brothers.

The Sadeghi family is just one of thousands that have disintegrated as individuals have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed for supporting the MEK. Over the past four decades, the clerical regime’s inhumane acts have created such an atmosphere of terror in society that no one would dare to approach the MEK and express sympathy for them. At the same time, the regime and its lobbies outside of Iran propagate the idea that the MEK has no popular base inside Iran.

Despite all this, the MEK and its resistance units have a clear presence in Iranian society, with daily activities demonstrating the group’s widespread popular support. During mass uprisings in 2018 and 2019, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other leading regime officials explicitly acknowledged the role of the MEK and its resistance units in advancing and organizing the protests.

But officials have also tried to conceal the MEK’s viability from international view by pursuing a large-scale demonization campaign, in which mercenaries of the Ministry of Intelligence posed as MEK members’ relatives. The goal was to send its mercenaries to the group’s Albanian headquarters under the cover of MEK families to gather information for terrorist operations against the MEK. In this regard, the “Rescue Association” affiliated with the Ministry of Intelligence sends various petitions to the Albanian authorities, signing them from the “families” of MEK members and requesting visas for those “families”.

A statement from the “Rescue Association” reads in part: “As of Monday, April 20, 2020, efforts have been made to collect signatures addressed to the Government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Albania requesting visas for families to visit their loved ones… In the second week, the representatives of the Rescue Association became widely active in 27 provinces of the country. Signatures were made from various cities in Iran and even from other countries.”

The regime’s benign explanation of these activities is, of course, absurd, and sheer lies. It is inconceivable that the regime feels sympathy for MEK family members or takes an interest in reuniting them, considering that the real family members have had their homes and property confiscated and have been sentenced to 15 years in prison simply for holding a funeral for a close relative who supports the MEK.