Iran orders investigation into claims that inmates raped in jails

Iran’s judiciary says a senior official has ordered an inquiry into allegations denied by the authorities of rape and sexual assault of inmates in the Islamic Republic’s jails.

“Vice president of the judicial authority for international affairs and secretary of the High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabdi, has asked the country’s prosecutor general to carry out a thorough investigation into the allegations of sexual assault and rape of some inmates,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online news website reports.

“Given the very negative effect of these claims, please carefully study and address these accusations, whether raised inside the country or outside of it,” Gharibabdi writes in a letter to prosecutor general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri quoted by Mizan.

“Before anything else, proof must be sought from the people expressing these claims,” he says, calling on Montazeri to bring to justice “the perpetrators or those making such allegations, depending on the result of the investigation.”