I am translating this article from the website of Third Wave, a pro-Mousavi and Khatami reformist group, on today’s arrest of Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, who is a student at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. -WW
Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, an official and spokesman for the pro- Khatami and Mousavi movement Third Wave, arrested Wednesday morning.
According to Third Wave, Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, a third year doctoral student at Oxford University studying Sociology of Religion, was departing for England with his wife at 1 AM this morning when he was arrested by security forces at the airport and his passport seized. According to Fatimeh Shams, his wife, who is also a member of the central committee for Third Wave, Jalaeipour is among the Iranian intellectual elite who won the first prize in the Konkour (Iranian national college entrance exam) in the year 1380 (2001-2). He is also winner of the gold medal in the national round of the Literary Olympics. He is currently a student at Oxford University.
His wife, Fatimeh Shams, said she was particularly worried by the way the arrest took place, “After about 5-10 minutes of waiting, an agent wearing civilian clothes took my husband with him without presenting any official order, and giving him only a few seconds to speak with me.”
She added: “My husband had come to carry out some research related to his doctoral thesis and had reserved a return ticket to England two months ago to return to Oxford at the end of the term to present his results. However he was prevented from travelling by this unknown accusation.”
Mohammadreza Jalaeipour has been a part of the Third Wave civil-legal campaign since last summer. During this time, he has been bound to all legal and administrative principles of this socio-political campaign.
Any further information on this situation will be immediately released.
UPDATE: There are reports on 14 Sept, 2009 that Jalaeipour has been released from Evin prison after 88 days.
I study a PhD in St Antony’s. We have received an email from the Warden (kind of Dean) confirming the news and to tell us that the family is trying to get Mohammad release. The family does not want any public statement or actions, at least for the moment, for they are trying to do it quietly and following the appropriate procedures.
There is news of this on Twitter. Hardly low key.
42 years ago visited the Shah of Persia West Berlin. To his support were some of his fellow countrymen in town, initially quiet and orderly, with Reza Pahlevi images presented on the roadside, where their ruler, the people showed.
The first protests against the Shah’s regime were loud, these people attacked the demonstrators. They threw stones and beat the demonstrators, with steel rods and the slats on which the Pahlevis images were attached. “Before the Schöneberg Town Hall and the German Opera, these armed Persians attacked unarmed demonstrators.” Wrote the German newspaper DIE ZEIT.
They should provoke crimes. They had connections to the notorious secret police and torture Persian apparatus SAVAK, who ruthlessly persecuted dissidents. SAVAK’s people were in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in series executed.
Violence attracts violence itself. What one sees in these days, in the few free press photos and television images that reach us from Tehran, like a terrible sense of déjà vu. Even if events – in different locations at different times and in different political systems – not comparable. Revolution guardsmen, police on motorcycles dive club from nowhere and attack on protesters in brutally.
They hunt students and devastate universities. They kill, they defend Ahmadinejad’s regime, like its predecessor SAVAK crimes in the name of the Shah did. They attack demonstrations to maintain a state, which appears to has cheated in the elections.
Sorry 4 my bad English