Why is Victoria man left to languish in Iran prison?

Awho’s who of former political prisoners stepped up at the University of Toronto last week to campaign for the release of a Victoria man jailed and tortured in Iran.

There was Mohamed Fahmy, the journalist sprung from an Egyptian prison in 2015 after pressure from the Canadian government.

There was Homa Hoodfar, the Montreal university academic whose feminism got her locked up by Iran for four months last year until Ottawa helped win her release.

And there was Mostafa Azizi, a Toronto filmmaker whose 15 months in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison included time in the same cell block as the Victorian, Saeed Malekpour.

Maryam Malekpour, Saeed’s sister, was happy for the support, yet couldn’t help but wonder: Why were they all free, but not her 41-year-old brother, held in Evin since 2008?

Others wonder, too. Why the deafening silence from Justin Trudeau, the only one with any chance of winning Saeed’s release? Is Canada really willing to sacrifice him, an apolitical pawn in a political game?

Saeed’s story has appeared here before: A whiz-kid software designer who had worked for several top Iranian companies, he came to Canada in 2004 with his wife, Fatima Eftekhari, a scientist who wanted to study in the West. Eventually, they gained permanent-resident status.

In 2006, they relocated to Victoria, where Malekpour freelanced as a website designer while Eftekhari finished her doctorate in medical nanotechnology and taught at the University of Victoria.

Their Saanich landlords described them as dream tenants, friendly, compassionate, helpful. They were fun-loving and outdoorsy, skiing Mount Washington, swimming the Sooke Potholes, hiking Mount Doug. By 2008, Malekpour had plans to take his master’s degree at UVic.

Those plans were dashed that October when Saeed, having rushed back to Tehran to be with his dying father, was snatched off the street and charged with running computer porn sites.

The accusation was nonsense, his supporters say. All he had done was design a photo-sharing software for a client who, without his knowledge, used it to upload pornography. The real story, they say, is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, worried about growing Internet and social-media use, was using his case to intimidate the country’s restive young people.

The international digital-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation put it like this: “Arresting a coder living in the West and accusing them of being a foreign spy running a Persian language porn network was intended to paint the ‘Net as a channel for corrupt Western influence — and to demonstrate that no one, not even coders living in a foreign country, could escape punishment.”

Malekpour was thrown in Evin prison, beaten, kept in solitary confinement for a year and tortured into a forced confession — one he recanted in a letter smuggled out of prison. His 2010 death sentence was commuted to life two years later.

That’s about the time his sister was forced to flee to Canada, having fought for her brother so hard that she herself faced arrest. Trained as an engineer, she now works as a project co-ordinator for a Vancouver mechanical contractor.

She continues to fight tirelessly for him. She says both the prison warden and prosecutor have agreed to furlough Saeed, but the Revolutionary Guard — the IRGC, the muscle behind Iran’s clerical rulers — has not.

Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, a Toronto-based human rights activist, says the Revolutionary Guard doesn’t want to admit it screwed up in snatching Saeed. His was a high-profile case, the first one closed by the IRGC’s Cyber Army, the computer-crackdown unit formed in the summer of 2008. Iran’s supreme leader paid the Cyber Army a lot of money to win a conviction, so the unit is reluctant agree to his release. “If they free Saeed, it makes them look weak,” said Nayeb Yazdi, who writes about Iranian issues on her Persian2English blog.

Besides, showing lenience to Saeed would send the wrong message to the Iranian Internet users they are trying to intimidate.

“The only way to get Saeed out of prison is to make him a big enough liability to the IRGC,” Nayeb Yazdi says. That won’t happen unless Trudeau and Foreign Affairs push the issue. “Saeed’s life is in their hands. They’re the only ones who can get him released.”

Yet that’s not happening. The federal Liberals, who have been vocal about other rights cases, have been dead quiet about Saeed as they work to re-establish relations with Iran. “I really did think Justin Trudeau would care, but I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t look like he does,” she says. “They’re turning a blind eye.”

Perhaps that’s because Saeed is easier to ignore than some other prisoners. Never a political guy, he wasn’t plugged into the IranianCanadian community, didn’t have the connected friends to push the feds.

That’s why his sister is trying to ramp up support, to goad Ottawa with some public pressure. Maryam wants people to write their members of Parliament, to write Iran’s supreme leader and to send Trudeau an email posted at act.eff.org.

Meanwhile, alone in Vancouver, she keeps in phone contact with her brother — trapped in prison, his marriage gone, eight years of his life gone. It’s up to others to tell her of his grim life in prison, though. He won’t.

“He doesn’t want to make me upset.”