The Foundation for Democracy is preoccupied by reports of the disappearance of a Sunni Moslem cleric, Molavi Ahmad Sayyad, and his alleged execution by the Iranian security forces.
The body of Molavi Ahmad Sayyad was discovered in a suburb of Bandar Abbas on February 2, 1996, five days after Sayyad was reportedly arrested as he was arriving at Bandar Abbas airport from the United Arab Emirates. Eyewitnesses who discovered the body on the outskirts of the city said the body was disintegrating and showed signs of torture. He was aged 50 at the time of death.
A spokesman for the family declared on Jan. 28, the day Molavi disappeared, that he had been arrested by two members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps who called him by name as he was arriving at the Bandar Abbas airport before taking him away to an undisclosed destination. Iran's Information (Intelligence) Ministry denied any responsibility for his death. The authorities conducted an autopsy on his body but refused to communicate the results to his family. They buried the body before it could be examined by the family or by independent doctors.
Originally from the eastern Iranian province of Sistan va-Balouchistan, Sayyad had studied at religious schools in Saudi Arabia for 16 years. In 1990, upon an earlier return trip to Iran, he was arrested and imprisoned in Bandar Abbas for five years. He complained of having been tortured repeatedly during that time.
Sayyad is the fourth Sunni Moslem cleric to have disappeared and reportedly been murdered in the region since 1994. According to reports the Foundation has received, sixty Sunni Moslem clerics who founded the Islamic Society Association in Zahedan after the 1994 killing were subsequently arrested and transferred to Evin prison in Tehran.
As the Foundation has noted in a previous communiqué [AM 005: Execution of alleged drug traffickers and "bandits"], the Iranian authorities appear to be using ethnic differences, "banditry" and "smuggling" as the pretexts for a brutal crackdown on potential opposition forces in the eastern provinces.
Similarly, the Foundation is concerned that the authorities are seeking to excite ethnic violence between Sunnis and Shiite Muslims in the region.
The Foundation has written to the leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamene'i, President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Ministries of Justice, Interior, and Foreign Affairs, and has sent an inquiry to Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, to request clarification about the disappearance of Molavi Ahmad Sayyad.
The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is a private, non-profit corporation registered in the State of Maryland. Contact: Kenneth R. Timmerman, Executive Director (exec@iran.org). FDI materials, including the FDI Newswire, are available free-of-charge via the Internet at http://www.iran.org/.