Jailed Iranian blogger Hossein Ronaghi Maleki has been transferred to hospital in critical condition.
Iran’s House of Human Rights website reports that Ronaghi Maleki was transferred to Hasheminejad hospital on Thursday.
In the past year, the jailed blogger has undergone four operations, including a kidney transplant. In the past, the authorities had refused to heed the advice of specialists to let him receive adequate treatment outside of prison facilities.
Ronaghi Maleki had begun a hunger strike to protest what he described as “the unfair 15-year prison term, the authorities’ refusal to grant sick leave and the psychological and physical pressures” he has been subjected throughout his imprisonment.
He began his hunger strike by protesting his condition in an open letter to Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi.
Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, who ran a blog under the penname Babak Khoramdin, was arrested in 2009, during the wave of arrests triggered by widespread protests against the result of the presidential election, which the opposition claimed was rigged to re-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
After close to 300 days in solitary confinement, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Last February, he began experiencing kidney complications for which he was finally given a transplant, but the authorities immediately returned him to jail after the procedure.
