The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is extremely concerned about the safety of a well-known Iranian journalist, Faraj Sarhouhi, who disappeared while boarding a flight from Tehran to Frankfurt, Germany at 5 AM on Nov. 3, 1996.
Mr. Sarhouhi was last seen by his family in Tehran as he went through the Customs control at Tehran's Mehrebad airport.
Relatives who had planned to meet him upon his arrival in Frankfurt, however, say Mr. Sarhouhi was not on the plane. Mr. Sarhouhi's family believe he was abducted by agents of the Ministry of Information and Security at the Tehran airport, since MOIS controls airport security.
This morning, the official Jomhouri-e Eslami newspaper published a brief item alleging that Mr. Sarhouhi did board the plane and actually arrived in Hamburg, not Frankfurt, and that he "disappeared" after his arrival in Germany.
This semi-official admission by the authorities that Mr. Sarhouhi is indeed missing is alarming, since it suggests that he may have been kidnapped and murdered in Tehran.
FDI has raised the issue of Mr. Sarhouhi's with the Islamic Republic authorities and with the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Iran, the Hon. Maurice Copithorne.
Mr. Sarhouhi is the editor of a well-known literary monthly magazine, Adineh, and was one of the 136 writers and intellectuals who signed an open letter to President Hashemi-Rafsanjani last year, calling for greater freedom in Iran.
On Sept. 9, 1996, 13 members of the Iranian Union of Writers were arrested and detained all night by MOIS agents in Tehran. They were warned not to engage in "counter-revolutionary" activities, including meetings of their writers group. And there have been numerous other reports in recent weeks of newspapers being closed, their publishers fined, and their editors threatened with jail, for publishing articles considered uncomplimentary by the regime.
We are concerned that Mr. Sarhouhi's disappearance and possible murder, and the spate of recent attacks against journalists and writers in Iran, constitute a serious deterioration in the human rights situation in Iran.
The Foundation for Democracy in Iran is a private, non-profit corporation registered in the State of Maryland. Contact: Kenneth R. Timmerman, Executive Director. Tel: (301) 946-2918. Fax: (301) 942-5341. FDI materials, including the FDI Newswire, are available free-of-charge via the Internet at http://www.iran.org