Zeinab Jalalian, a Kurdish political prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment, was once again banned from the weekly meeting by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Also, Khoy Prison officials have denied her access to necessary medicine.
According to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), on Monday, December 3, Khoy Prison officials have told Zeinab Jalalian that she would not be able to visit her family upon an order by the Ministry of Intelligence.
On the other hand, prison staff continue to deny Zeinab Jalalian access to required medicine. The political prisoner was taken to a prison health center last week, following intense kidney pain, but prison authorities prevented her from visiting a hospital outside the prison for further examination.
According to the human rights institution, the pressure on Zeinab Jalalian has reached a new phase in the past two months. After the detention of her lawyer, Amir Salar Davoudi, prison authorities, without any specific reason, seized all her personal belongings, including clothes, blankets, manuscripts and books.
The political prisoner has been struggling since February 2017 to protest the lack of medical examination and forgery of medical records, indicating that essential health measures were not taken and the report was sent to Iranian state channel Press TV by the Ministry of Intelligence; yet she continues a medicine strike.
Zeinab Jalalian, born in 1982, a resident of the Deim Gheshlag village in Maku city, was arrested by the Kermanshah Intelligence Directorate in February 2007. She was interrogated for about a month in the detention center of the Kermanshah Information Office, charged with being a member of PJAK, under intense physical and mental torture. Zeinab Jalalian was sentenced to death in 2008 in a false court in Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court of Kermanshah. In winter 2009, her death sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Iran’s regime.
Zeinab Jalalian was transferred to ward 209 of Evin Prison in March 2008 to conduct a television interview. Rejecting the promise of freedom offered in exchange for her surrender and participation in a television interview led to the return of the political prisoner to Kermanshah’s Dizel Abad Prison again.
The death sentence for Jalaliyan was reduced to life imprisonment in November 2011 and she was transferred to Khoy prison in December 2014 from Kermanshah prison. Zeinab Jalalian has been protesting the ban on access to medical services during a medicine strike since January 2017.
