Ardeshir Darvishi, 63, was a sympathizer of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization while he was an army officer of the Iranian army. He left the army in 1991 and joined the group in Camp Ashraf, Iraq, but he soon regretted his decision.
“When I entered Camp Ashraf, I felt like arriving in my dream promised land but after a year and a half I got to know the MEK deeply; I found out that I was wrong,” he told the judge of the Iranian court to appeal against the leaders of the MEK.
Ardeshir asked for leaving the group but there was no exit in the Cult of Rajavi. In response, in 1994 he was jailed in the notorious prisons of Ashraf called Eskan. “I was jailed there together with Hamzeh Rahimi and Hassan Yazdi,” he recounts in his memoirs of Ashraf prison. “We were shocked. We did not know why we were imprisoned. Assadollah Mosana, Mokhtar, Sayedsadat and Mohammad Mohaddsin, the interrogators, had no answer. They beat us for three nights. The fourth night, they told us to confess that we were the spies of the regime!”
Ardeshir and other prisoners were taken to the torture room constantly and were beaten by cables and wooden sticks. One night, the torturer Mokhtar Janat Sadeghi pulled out his nails. “A nail of my fingers and one of my toes were swollen and infected. I fainted of severe pain and ache.”
Ardeshir also writes about the fate of his two other comrades. Hamzed was killed under torture. Ardeshir did not see him anymore. To get rid of tortures, Hassan tried to kill himself twice.
Besides, Ardeshir witnessed another murder under tortures in Rajavi’s jails. Parviz Ahamadi is one of the two people whose killing by the torturers of the MEK was documented by Human Rights Watch in the report published on the group titled “No Exit” in 2005.
“In order to pass the corridor from our cell to the torture room, our eyes were blindfolded,” Ardeshir writes. “In that dark and wet room, I could hear the others’ moaning.”
At one of those nights, the corridor seemed crowded. While being taken to the torture room, Ardeshir heard them talking about Parviz Ahmadi’s dead body. He used the opportunity and tried to remove a part of the cloth on his eyes. “Sayedsadat told, ‘Take the body!’”, Ardeshir recounts. “Sirous Janat asked, ‘what’s up?’. He replied, ‘Parviz Ahmadi died’. They took the dead body immediately and sent me back to my cell. I remember that Adel who was the director of the prison said, ‘I will tell Maryam (Rajavi) about him stop interrogating others for tonight.”
The death of Parviz Ahmadi under torture in 1994 has been testified by several former members of the MEK. Ardeshir’s account indicates that Maryam Rajavi the co-leader of the group was aware of everything taking place in the their prisons.
QorbanAli Torabi is another victim of torturers of the Cult of Rajavi whose killing has been in the limelight in recent months after his son Mohammad Reza (Ray) Torabi began to appeal the MEK’s leaders for his father’s death.