Iran student activist missing
2003-11-11 21:18
Tehran - A prominent Iranian student activist who met with a visiting United Nations rights envoy over the weekend has gone missing, the student news agency ISNA reported on Tuesday.
The agency also quoted Iran's prosecutor general, Abdolnabi Namazi, as dismissing the integrity of the UN's Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Ambeyi Ligabo, who spent a week here on a key fact-finding mission.
ISNA said the student activist, Ahmad Batebi, was reported by his father to have gone missing on Saturday after meeting with Ligabo.
The student was one of hundreds detained during student-led protests here in 1999, and a photograph of him holding aloft a bloodstained T-shirt - a picture that was widely carried across the world - earned him a death sentence for propagating against the Islamic regime.
His sentence was eventually reduced on appeal to 13 years imprisonment, and he had been on prison leave for medical reasons when he met with Ligabo. His father told ISNA that his prison leave had been due to expire on Monday, but that he had gone missing on Saturday.
"If I have no news of my son and if the security of my family is not assured, I will contact human rights defence organisations," his father told the agency.
Meanwhile, Namazi complained that Ligabo had raised "secondary and marginal questions" while in Iran, and said he was not expecting a balanced report from the Kenyan diplomat.
"International organisations are generally under the influence of the Zionists who always try to put into question the Islamic republic," Namazi told ISNA.
While in Iran, Ligabo met with a string of officials and dissidents and called on Iran to release all those jailed for press related offences or having merely spoken out against the clerical regime.
He said access to the people he wanted to see had largely been satisfied, and added that a number of prisoners he met had complained of serious mistreatment, notably periods of more than 100 days of solitary confinement.
His report, due for release next March, will be taken into consideration when member states of the United Nations Human Rights Commission decide on whether to forward a resolution condemning Iran.