Leila Hosseinzadeh, a well-praised Iranian student activist was brutally arrested in Shiraz on December 7th, 2021, and forcefully sent to detention in Shiraz Prison before she was stealthily transferred to 209 Ward of Tehran's Evin Prison. Her whereabouts were not announced by the intelligence agents of Iran for two weeks until after she was eventually allowed to speak to her parents who had been desperately looking for her.
Born in a working-class family, Hosseinzadeh's student activism was tied to the workers' unions and student unions' demands which made her a popular pragmatic figure among both leftist intellectuals and laborers. It is not her first time to become a subject to brutal arrests and imprisonment. Hosseinzadeh was first arrested amid her partaking in the December 2017 protests. She was released on bail after having spent 16 days under interrogations in detention. On July 28, 2019, she was again arrested by the intelligence service agents and sent to Evin Prison Women's Ward to serve her 30 months' prison sentence.
After each arrest, she was sent to the Revolutionary courts of Branch 28 and Branch 26 to receive sentences for her partaking in the birthday party of the Dervish activist Mohammad Sharifi Moqaddam and singing the revolutionary song of "the blood of Judas trees" in public. She was allegedly charged with "conspiracy against national security", and "assembly and collusion against national security".
She was ultimately sentenced to a 5-year imprisonment, a 2-year ban from social media activism, and a 2-year deprivation of leaving Iran. She served 2.5 years of her sentence before she was released in accordance with the decision of Tehran Province's Appeals Court on June 24, 2019. The master graduate of anthropology from Tehran University, Hosseinzadeh has been actively involved in students' demands such as the student movement against privatization of education.
A few days before her latest arrest, she was sentenced to imprisonment and social deprivation by the Tehran Appeal Court Branch 36. However, she was arrested at the presence of 15 intelligence agents while she was on vacation in Shiraz. She was extremely beaten under an aggravated mayhem by the agents. Her family have reported that she was prevented from taking her medications which are necessary for her serious illness and is now in a physically critical situation.■
Written by a collective of Iranian comrades.
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Update: Leila Hossein has been transferred to Shiraz again and applied for 1.5﷼ billion (£25K) bail for her release.
Update 2: Leila Hosseinzad was released on bail on the second.
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