Two more Iranian political prisoners, Mohammad Ali Velayati and Ahmadreza Ahmadpour, have started a hunger strike to protest the situation of political prisoners in Iran.
The Kaleme opposition website reports that Mohammad Ali Velayati, the head of MirHosein Mousavi’s provincial campaigns in the 2009 presidential elections, has been on a hunger strike since Wednesday, March 14 in protest of “the complete shutdown of the Constitution and the issuance of unreal, arbitrary and cruel sentences for numerous political prisoners.”
Velayati is currently in ward 350 of Evin Prison and has called for a meeting with the Islamic Republic’s Prosecutor General as well as a new hearing.
Velayati was arrested in February of 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison for “collusion and assembly against national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”
The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) also reports that Ahmadreza Ahmadpour, a member of the clergy and the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, has begun a hunger strike in Ahvaz Sepidar Prison.
Last Tuesday, he informed his family that he is to be transferred outside of the province, and the family has been told that they cannot visit him because he is now on a hunger strike.
Ahmadpour, who is being denied leave to visit his sick wife, was arrested in December of 2009 and sentenced to one year in prison and defrocking for “publishing false information about the regime and putting Shiite clergy into disrepute.”
He was released after serving his time but was picked up once again by a plainclothes officer in June of 2011, remaining in custody ever since.
Ahmadpour had earlier gone through a 16-day hunger strike to protest prison conditions and written a letter about it to the United Nations Secretary General.
Ahmadipour is now sentenced to three years in prison, 10 years of exile and expulsion from the ranks of the clergy.
