Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, August 22, 2019–In a futile bid to incriminate the rivaling faction, Ali Rabiei, the spokesperson of Iranian regime president Hassan Rouhani, confessed to some of the heinous crimes of his regime.
Rabiei, who has a long history serving the Iranian regime’s intelligence apparatus, described the torturing and extracting forced confessions from 13 prisoners and executing one of them as a “professional mistake” of another department. The prisoners were being interrogated on their alleged involvement in the assassination of the Iranian regime’s nuclear scientists. After torturing them, the regime broadcasted their forced confessions from state TV.
While the torture of these prisoners continued for a full year after Rouhani assumed office, Rabiei said, “This did not happen during our administration, and I had no access or authority on the dossier to say that I had intervened.”
Rabiei further said, “According to information that exists, there were a number of people who confessed on this case, and I spoke to some officials and they said that one of the confessions was true. But regretfully, some of the measures were unprofessional, and the people who worked on this file were not espionage experts. They were from other domains.”
The Iranian regime regularly extracts and broadcasts forced confessions from prisoners to justify its cruel sentences and punishments, a practice that has been condemned by human rights organizations. In 2016, Amnesty International published a comprehensive report on how the regime uses forced confession and propaganda to dehumanize death row prisoners.
“By parading death row prisoners on national TV, [Iranian] authorities are blatantly attempting to convince the public of their ‘guilt’, but they cannot mask the disturbing truth that the executed men were convicted of vague and broadly defined offences and sentenced to death after grossly unfair trials,” said Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, at the time.
