Pressure on as jailed Iranian dissident hints death is near

Yahoo News:

The pressure on Iran to free jailed dissident Akbar Ganji is growing with each day of his hunger strike, but the hardline judiciary insists it is not going to release every prisoner just because he goes without food.

Ganji, who has been on hunger strike for 35 days, hinted in a recent letter that he is dying.

"This flame is going out, but (my) voice will raise others that will be louder," Ganji said in a July 10 letter to "defenders of freedom throughout the world" that caused growing concern among his supporters.

Despite alarming reports about the political prisoner's health, Iran's ultra-conservative judiciary has refused to set him free.

"He is under special medical care ... and the prison physicians examine him two or three times a day," the deputy head of Tehran's judiciary, Mohammad Salarkia, said Thursday quoted by the IRNA agency.

"We too are unhappy with the conditions Ganji has created for himself but he is a prisoner who should serve his prison term. Every prisoner going on hunger strike is not going to be released."

For its part, the prosecutor's office in Tehran said Ganji had been examined by doctors on Thursday and that his condition was stable.

He is in "very good condition, according to the doctors, and contrary the psychological war by certain media," said a statement carried by IRNA.

Ganji was sentenced in 2001 to six years behind bars over articles he wrote linking senior regime officials, including ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian, to the serial murders of several intellectuals and writers.

Ganji, who has demanded his unconditional release, reiterated that he would rather die than give up his ideals: "Socrates chose death so that his ideas could live on; by his death he became the symbol of individual freedom in the community." READ MORE

He launched a fresh verbal attack on Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and continued to defy the Islamic regime by preaching "civil disobedience" at the risk of compromising any possible release.

In order to write the letter, Ganji told of struggling to overcome "great physical weakness."

Ganji said he had lost 22 kilograms (48 pounds) has been consuming water and sugar cubes since he began the hunger strike, which he observed for 12 days before stopping temporarily when he was granted a short period of leave on medical grounds.

He resumed the strike on his return to prison on June 11.

The hunger strike was initially launched as a protest after Ganji, who says he suffers from chronic asthma, was not allowed to seek medical treatment outside prison.
The prisoner, who was visited Thursday by three friends, "fell briefly into a coma Monday", according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"He is currently in the prison hospital ... Doctors say he needs one month of total rest outside prison," the source added.

"His friends asked him to abandon his hunger strike. They told him that after 30 days he risked irreversible damage to his organs and a brutal death but he continues to demand his unconditional release."

Salarkia said Ganji's family had been informed that he could have been hospitalised at a medical centre outside the prison but the dissident tried to "politicise" the issue.
Those close to Ganji say there are some who want to get revenge against Ganji, who has relentlessly criticised the regime.

Still, his friends have not given up hope.

"It is not impossible that he could be freed this week," said one source close to Ganji.

There have been widespread calls for Ganji's liberation, including from the European Union, Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and the United States, which has praised his "courageous efforts to investigate extra-judicial killings by Iranian security forces and his commitment to free speech and democratic government".

Mohammad Taq Rahbar, an MP and cleric, said: "Ganji must start to eat so that he does not die. Hunger strikes are illegal in prison.

"Who said there was no freedom in Iran?" Rahbar asked. "Show me another place in the world where one could make such scornful statements against the system."