Anger Grows After Iranian Prisoner Dies
TEHRAN — When the call finally came, Maryam Seyed Emami’s heart leapt. Except for one brief phone call, she had heard nothing from her husband, Kavous Seyed Emami, a professor and prominent environmentalist, since he was arrested with six other people and accused of spying more than two weeks before, in late January. Now, she was being told to come to the offices of the Tehran prosecutor, where she could see her husband at last.
She rushed off, but instead of being taken to see her husband she was closeted in a room with a prosecutor and four intelligence agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and interrogated for several hours.
When the agents ran out of questions, she was informed she could see her husband. There was just one thing, they said. He was dead, having committed suicide in his cell.
“They should have built a statue to him, not let him die in prison,” said her son Ramin, 36, a well- known singer in Iran who appears under the stage name King Raam. He and his brother Mehran, 34, said they decided to ignore warnings from the interrogators and speak out in the hope of pressing the authorities about what had really happened to their father and to other prisoners who have died recently in Iran’s prisons.
“We want a transparent investigation,” said Mehran, who denied accusations that his father was a spy.
The death of Mr. Seyed Emami has become a rallying point for middle- class Iranians. Mr. Seyed Emami, the star of a video about the possibility of change, was a symbol of hope. “My father was always full of hope, he made me believe change is possible, even in places you least expect it,” said Mehran. “He had a gift for bringing people from all walks of life together.”
His death in Evin Prison is feeding into a growing anger and disaffection in Iran over a system many fear will never change. Those feelings erupted in nationwide demonstrations earlier this year, and helped drive a number of women to take off their headscarves recently in public to protest mandatory veiling.
Mr. Seyed Emami is also among a growing number of prominent Iranians and Westerners, at least six of them Iranian-Americans and others with dual passports, who have been imprisoned in what analysts say is a deadly competition between conservatives in Iran clinging to the revolution and those trying to respond to widespread yearnings for change.
Lately, the hardliners have found new strength, analysts say, their anti-Western position bolstered by growing threats from President Donald J. Trump of the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
A sociologist teaching at Imam Sadiq University, Mr. Seyed Emami had stood out for believing in gradual change and individual responsibility for making it happen. He held a Canadian passport.
In his free time, Mr. Seyed Emami, a youthful 64 when he died, led an environmental organization, the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation. Cameras the foundation had set up to track rare animals would figure in the spying charges. The Iranian authorities say he and others had “installed cameras in the country’s strategic locations to monitor Iran’s missile activities, sending information to foreigners.”
To Mr. Seyed Emami’s family, those assertions are ludicrous. “It’s just all so ridiculous, we don’t even know where to start,” Ramin said. “Those cameras, for instance, are for shooting wildlife, their range doesn’t go beyond 25 meters. They are cheap and can be bought anywhere. Even if they wanted — which they didn’t — how could they spy on the missile program with those?”
Ramin says he thinks often of a conversation he had with his father a few days before his arrest, when he had been feeling depressed. “We spoke about the way to live a good life,” he said. His dad laughed, and had a single answer. “The key is to give love. That is where happiness comes from.”