Baha’is in Iran - yet more persecution

by Barney

News of the intensifying persecution of the Baha’is in Iran just keeps coming.

There have been two very disturbing murders of elderly Iranian Baha’i women in their homes.

Behnam Saltanat Akhzari, an 85-year-old resident of Abbas Abad, a dependency of Abadeh in Shiraz, was killed on 16 February 2007. The following day, Shah Beygom Dehghani, a 77-year-old Baha’i, was viciously assaulted by a masked intruder in her home in Mohammadiyyeh, in the province of Isfahan. Mrs. Dehghani died on 7 March 2007. The two women were unrelated.

The motive for these attacks remains unknown at the moment, but the similarity between the two murders is alarming. Both victims were elderly women who were alone at the time of the attacks, which occurred in their homes in relatively small towns.

The unknown assailants brutally assaulted each of the women. Mrs. Akhzari’s body was found in her house with her hands and feet bound and her mouth gagged. Mrs. Dehghani was lured out of her house in the middle of the night and then savagely attacked with a lawn rake. She suffered broken hands and ribs, head injuries, and critical damage to her liver and kidneys. When her screams caused the intruder to flee, she crawled to a neighbour’s home for help. Despite medical attention, her wounds proved fatal. She died on 7 March 2007, some two-and-a-half weeks after the attack. No suspects have been identified in either case.

Murders of elderly women in Britain would be headline news in the UK media, especially if there was a suspicion that the killers’ motives were racial or religious. I don’t suppose these murders of Baha’is merited even a short paragraph in any Iranian newspaper.

Although we don’t know who killed Mrs Akhzari or Mrs Dehghani and why, we do know who stole the home of the widow of a Baha’i who died in jail.

In an act of extreme callousness and cruelty, the Revolutionary Court of Yazd told Mrs Nahid Beygi, whose husband, Zabihollah Mahrami, died in prison in December 2005, that her home had been confiscated. After her husband’s death Mrs. Beygi had legally transferred ownership of her home to her four sons. Nevertheless, the court announced that the court order for Mr Mahrami’s execution included confiscation of his property; the house now belongs to the government.

Mr Mahrami, 59, had been wrongfully jailed in harsh physical conditions in Yazd for ten years when he died - just because he was a Baha’i.

As if these attacks were not enough, vilification and defamation of the Baha’is continues in Iranian newspapers and blogs and in a book published by Kayhan, a government-run newspaper in Iran. The Light and Shade of Bahaism is a compilation of the series of attacks against the Faith printed in Kayhan in 2005. An online review of the book on 6 March 2007 on the Sobhe Sadegh website is clearly designed to foment mistrust and hatred of the Baha’is.