Former member of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Samad Nazari recounts the story of Ahmad Heidari, a victim of the group who was tortured in its prisons.
Samad Nazari was a former member of the MEK who defected the group more than three decades ago. He returned to Iran where he later founded Nejat NGO. His autobiography titled “Footprint of the Evil” was focused on the years of his membership and imprisonment in the MEK and defection from the group. Nazari passed away in the Fall of 2014.
In 1991, at the time of the first Gulf war, Samad Nazari was jailed in solitary confinement in the MEK’s Debes prison (Askarizadeh camp) near Kirkuk, Iraq. He was punished for his decision to leave the Cult of Rajavi!
Samad Nazari
During his breath-taking process of defection, Samad witnessed imprisonment, torture and killing of many of his peers. In a part of his memoirs, he writes about a man named Ahmad Heidari. He was jailed together with 5 other members. He recalls that Ahmad Heidari was brought to the cell in the weekend:
“He was badly beaten, with wounded and bruised head. His clothes were torn and his mental condition was not normal. He was Ahmad Heidari who had been irritated by Rajavi’s ideological revolution and since then he had started dissent against Rajavi.”
In the meeting that he was told to divorce his wife, he was so shocked by Rajavi’s order that he cried insults against Massoud and Maryam Rajavi and Fahimeh Arvani.
Nazari writes, “Ahmad had committed a huge crime, so he was attacked by some of the commanders. He was beaten and jailed in solitary confinement. He went on a hunger strike. In that mental state, he constantly cursed Rajavi, Maryam and Fahimeh.”
After a week Ahmad was brought to the office of Majid Alamian –the notorious torturer of the MEK. “Ahmad was so disgusted by the commanders that again started shouting insults,” Samad Nazari writes. “Majid beat his fist on Ahmad’s head. Ahmad was shocked and eventually silenced. Majid went out and Ahmad walked through the corridors around the office. He soiled the building and the sleeping equipment there.”
The torturer, Majid Alamian, comes back at lunch time and throws Ahmad in solitary confinement again. Ahmad pooped and pied all over the cell. “Majid tied his feet and hands and beat him harshly,” Nazari recounts, “He kicked Ahmad’s chest so much that she lost consciousness and fell into a coma.”
This was the daily routine of Ahmad for a few days. Nazari writes, “When we opened his arms and legs, he was shaking for an hour and could not stand.”
Majid Almaian and other commanders presumed that Ahmad had no mental problem, so they put pressure on him to confess his sins (insults against the leaders of the cult). Samad Nazari does not know much about the fate of Ahmad. He was taken out of the camp a few days later and nobody could know about his whereabouts anymore.