Pedestrian

On the night of October 22nd, police raided the home of Shahabeddin Tabatabaie’s parents who were holding a prayer for their son and arrested almost everyone there.

Among others, they once again arrested Mohammad Reza Jalaiepour, the 24 year old son of Hamid Reza Jalaiepour, and a central figure in Mousavi’s youth campaign. His wife, Fatemeh Shams is in England and wrote about the arrest in her blog. She mentioned something along the lines of “they used to only raid parties, now they raid prayers too.”

After her post, bloggers strongly criticized her for implying (she claims she didn’t) that it was less derogatory to raid a party than a prayer.

She’s come out on her blog with an apology and a clarification, and with an interesting account from Etemad newspaper.

Turns out that night security forces arrested everyone at the prayer, there was actually a big party going on on another floor in that same building. Two girls who were heading to the party were interrogated by the security forces outside the building, and when asked “if they were attending the prayer” they had jumped out to say “yes!” to escape arrest, and thus were also arrested. Once in custody however, they were finally able to persuade police to let them go.

According to eye-witness accounts:

“We were in handcuffs and they were taking us towards the van. At the bottom of the stairs, the police stopped two girls who were all dressed up and obviously heading to a party and harshly asked them: “where are you going?” The poor things were terrified and confused as to where all the screaming was coming from. As they were looking at each other, the police said: “you were going to prayer?” and they happily took the opportunity and started nodding “yes!” The police quickly handcuffed them too and took them outside, towards the van. Then they started screaming: “I swear the god, we weren’t going to a prayer, we were going to a party! You’re arresting us by mistake!” But they were pushed into the van. They were bringing everybody from the prayer one after another in handcuffs.  They took all of us to temporary detention. The girls kept explaining that they were heading to a party and thought the police had raided the gathering and thus lied to get themselves off the hook. They were released once the police did a background check and made sure.”

Now if you’ve ever participated in those big Tehran parties where you were terrified of police raiding the place half the night, you’d realize the irony of this story.

I’m glad however that the party goers were left alone for once.

And I’m not implying that either raid is half humane or justified or anything less than sick.