Tonight, Wednesday, 16 July 2003, a cold fury hangs over every surviving newsroom in Tehran. Many of us saw Zahra Kazemi in the weeks before her arrest: a fearless 54-year-old Iranian-Canadian photographer who had traveled from Montreal with her camera slung over her shoulder to document life in her homeland.
On 23 June, after days of student protests across Tehran, anxious mothers and fathers had gathered outside the gates of Evin Prison begging for news of their detained children Zahra raised her lens to photograph those waiting families outside Evin and on the orders of Tehran Chief Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, security agents dragged her inside the prison walls. Less than three weeks later, she was dead
What We Know Tonight, 16 July 2003, About Zahra Kazemi's Murder
The government is forced to admit she was beaten to death: After days in which Mortazavi's judiciary claimed she fell ill from "stomach trouble" or a natural stroke, Vice President Mohammad-Ali Abtahi told reporters following today's cabinet meeting that, according to the Health Minister's examination, Kazemi "died of a brain hemorrhage resulting from beatings".
Three days of brutal interrogation before falling into a coma: Word leaking from hospital staff confirms that within seventy-two hours of her arrest at Evin, ferocious blows to her head fractured her skull and plunged her into an irreversible coma inside the IRGC-run Baghiatollah Hospital on June 27, where she died on July 10.
Mortazavi's desperate rush to bury the body: Yesterday authorities barely halted plans to bury her body after Ottawa and her son in Montreal, Stephan Hachemi, demanded her remains be returned to Canada for an independent autopsy (RFE/RL, Reporters Without Borders)
Why a Camera Terrifies This Regime More Than an Army
Ask yourself why interrogators inside Evin Prison felt compelled to crush the skull of a 54-year-old woman holding nothing but a camera. Because from its very first days in 1979, the Islamic Republic's survival has depended on keeping its torture chambers invisible.
When the revolutionary tribunals began executing political prisoners and shutting down independent newspapers in 1979 and the 1980s, Iran's ideological left cheered the silencing of the "bourgeois press" - never imagining that within a few years their own mothers would be standing outside Evin with no journalist left free to photograph their tears. Zahra Kazemi stood on the pavement outside Evin so those families would not be invisible anymore. Tonight her camera is broken, and Saeed Mortazavi still sits in the prosecutor's chair - but all of Iran now knows who murdered Zahra Kazemi.
