Updated on April 11, 2020:
According to HRANA, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, Mustafa Salimi was executed in Saqqez Prison this morning, Saturday, April 11, 2020.
Mustafa was accused of a murder. According to the same news agency, Mr. Almasi, the head of the Senteh village police department, had officially withdrawn his testimony that he was a murderer.
Regarding the prisoner’s efforts to prove his innocence, a source close to his family had previously told HRANA: “Before his arrest, he had business trips there, and he received a document with seals and signatures of the village council and mosque’s Imams, stating that he had not only take any money from them, but also did not cause them any loss of life or property.”
In the last follow-up of the prisoner’s family, in February 2019, Mr. Hesari, the Judiciary’s Deputy, told them: “Go and thank God that he is still alive and we did not execute him.”
April 10, 2020
In the Tilko area of Saqqez County, there is a village called Ilo. Abdullah was his father’s name. Mustafa Salimi Iloyi was born on June 25, 1967. Mustafa is now 52 years old. But if you ask him, he may not know what his name is and where he comes from and how old he is. Mustafa wrote these lines 11 years ago in February 2009:
“I do not know exactly, but I must be 40 years old. My wife divorced me after my arrest. My son Ashkan must be about 15 years old. Spending many years in solitary confinement and prison may have made me forgotten the exact age of my son.”
He guessed right. Eleven years ago, after six years of torture, solitary confinement, imprisonment, and multiple hunger strikes, Mustafa’s soul and memory were compromised. He was a forty-two-year-old man. His Ashkan was only eleven years old at the time. A child who commits suicide nine years later on a hot summer day when he was twenty years old. Ashkan’s soul was crushed that day by them (Islamic Republic’s thugs). He had gone to Branch 6 of the Saqqez Prosecutor’s Office to follow up on his father’s condition, who had been in prison for more than 15 years. All day long, he had been passed from room to room. Finally, he was ridiculed and threatened by a judge of the Sixth Branch and the staff of that office. He was told that if he said anything else, he would be thrown out of the window.
When Ashkan returned home, he ended his life by eating a handful of pills.
His father, Mustafa, was brought to the hospital under protection, witnessing the death of his son from behind the ICU room’s glass.
In the same year, 2010, when Mustafa Salimi thought he was 40 years old and had a 15-year-old son, 11-year-old Ashkan wrote a childish and open letter. He wrote about being away from his father for eight years. From “Protecting Humanity and Human Rights.” Ashkan ends the letter with the following words:
“As the son of someone who is innocent in prison and has been sentenced to death, I call on all judicial authorities and officials, my father is not guilty and release him and I ask all people to help my father because he does not deserve to be executed. And don’t let my father be executed.”
Mustafa was a gas company contractor. When he was arrested at the home of a relative in Nahavand, Lorestan, he was no longer a member of any group or party. It was 2003. Ashkan was five years old and he was a 36-year-old father.
Six years later, he no longer remembers his own age, nor does he remember much of his son.
What did they do to him? Mustafa explains:
“[…]Many years have passed since that court hearing. I have been sentenced to death for almost 5 years, and I wait in prison cells every night to wake up at the sound of the prison guard’s voice to hang me, which is better for me than another night full of anxiety. Anxiety about when I will be executed and get rid of this uncertainty. Yes, I have felt the rope around my neck for almost five years.”
Eleven years later, when he spent 18 years of his life in Saqqez, Sanandaj, and Rajai Shahr prisons, he escaped from Saqqez prison along with 70 other prisoners on Friday, March 27, 2020, during the Saqqez prison riot. The cause of the riot was the coronavirus outbreak in prison, lack of proper health conditions, high probability of contracting the disease and fear of death. Ten days after his escape, Mustafa was rearrested on April 6.
Today, Friday, April 10, Saqqez prison officials contacted the family of 52-year-old Mustafa Salimi Iloyi, a native of Ilo village in Tilko area of Saqqez, son of Abdullah, father of Ashkan Salimi, former contractor of a gas company, who has been in Islamic Republic’s prisons for 18 years without a day off, sentenced to death.
Mustafa’s family has been asked to go to the prison for their last visit.
Translation of this article by Sahar.