![\"\"](\"https:\/\/persian-heritage.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Ahmad-Reza-Jalali-300x200.jpg\")
VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – The wife of an Iranian-Swedish medical doctor detained in Iran in 2016 and later sentenced to death for alleged espionage says Iranian officials have ignored her ailing husband\u2019s request for leave from a coronavirus-afflicted prison.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nIn a Friday phone interview with VOA Persian from Sweden, Vida Mehran Nia said Iran\u2019s judiciary has offered no response to release requests from her husband Ahmad Reza Jalali, his lawyers and the U.N. Human Rights Council. He is detained at Tehran\u2019s Evin prison.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mehran Nia expressed concern about Jalali\u2019s wellbeing due to multiple illnesses that have made him vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, which rights activists have said has been spreading at Evin and other Iranian prisons in recent months. She said her husband has told her in daily phone conversations that he has been suffering from gastrointestinal disease, decreased production of blood cells and a weak immune system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jalali\u2019s wife also said he has been kept in solitary confinement and deprived of access to basic services such as the prison library.\u00a0\u201cPerhaps that will help him to avoid contracting the virus,\u201d\u00a0she said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Iran has granted temporary releases, or furloughs, to tens of thousands of prisoners since late February, in part to ease overcrowding in its unsanitary prisons and curb the spread of the virus. But it has refused to furlough prisoners serving more than five-year sentences for offenses designated as security crimes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jalali, a disaster medicine researcher who had been based in Sweden, was arrested in April 2016 while visiting Iran to\u00a0attend a scientific conference at the invitation of\u00a0Tehran\u00a0University.\u00a0Iran\u2019s judiciary accused him of collaboration with hostile foreign governments and sentenced him to death in October 2017 for\u00a0\u201csowing corruption on earth,\u201d\u00a0an offense punishable by execution.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sweden granted Jalali citizenship in February 2018 in a, so far, unsuccessful bid to persuade Iran to commute his sentence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The scientist appeared on Iranian state TV<\/a> in December 2017, making a purported confession to providing information to Israel\u2019s Mossad spy agency about Iranian military and nuclear scientists, two of whom were assassinated in 2010. Iran considers Israel to be its arch foe.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In a voice recording later posted on YouTube, Jalali was heard saying that his interrogators had forced him into making several videotaped confessions. His wife has campaigned for years to clear his name.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMany Iranian judicial and security officials whom we have spoken to, are convinced of his innocence and the wrongfulness of his death sentence, but none are willing to publicly acknowledge this and accept responsibility for making a mistake,\u201d\u00a0Mehran Nia said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It was not clear which officials Mehran Nia was referring to. She said her husband\u2019s lawyers provided evidence proving his innocence to the judiciary a year-and-a-half ago, but it has refused to commute his death sentence.\u00a0\u201cHe still is at risk of execution,\u201d\u00a0she said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n U.N. human rights experts<\/a> affiliated to the U.N. Human Rights Council issued a statement in February 2018 calling on Iran to annul Jalali\u2019s death sentence and release him.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The U.N. experts said the Iranian government had informed them that Jalali had been allowed meetings with his lawyers and phone calls with his family. But the experts said Iran\u00a0\u201capparently\u201d\u00a0had not complied with its\u00a0international obligations to give him a fair trial and\u00a0a meaningful opportunity to\u00a0appeal\u00a0against his conviction.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n This article originated in VOA\u2019s Persian Service<\/a>.\u00a0Click here<\/a> for the original Persian version of the story.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – The wife of an Iranian-Swedish medical doctor detained in Iran in 2016 and later sentenced to death for alleged espionage says Iranian officials have ignored her ailing husband\u2019s request for leave from a coronavirus-afflicted prison.\u00a0\u00a0 In a Friday phone interview with VOA Persian from Sweden, Vida Mehran Nia said Iran\u2019s judiciary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86303,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}