The family said Mohammadi had a “clear right” to attend his father’s funeral.
Paris:
Iranian authorities prevented jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Nargis Mohammadi from attending the funeral of her father, who died earlier this week, her family said on Thursday.
Karim Mohammadi died on Tuesday at the age of 90 after not seeing his daughter for nearly two years. He was buried early Thursday in the city of Zanjan, northwest of Tehran.
“It is heartbreaking that Nargis Mohammadi was denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony and say a final goodbye to her father,” her family said in a statement.
The family has previously said Mohammadi had a “clear right” to attend his father’s funeral.
Mohammadi, 51, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her human rights campaign in Iran, has spent much of the past two decades in and out of prison.
She has been imprisoned since November 2021 and has not seen her husband and twin children in Paris for several years. Last year, she was also stripped of her right to call relatives in Iran from prison, a right that has yet to be restored.
The family said the restrictions meant she had not seen her father for 22 months and had not spoken to him on the phone for the past three months. Even on the day of his death, “she was not allowed to call the family to express her condolences.”
“The longing to hear my daughter’s voice from the prison of her oppressors was unbearable,” the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran quoted her father as saying days before his death.
Mohammadi has received additional convictions while in prison, most recently being sentenced to more than a year in prison for spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic while in prison.
Her current sentence, according to her family, is 12 years and three months in prison, 154 lashes, two years in exile and various social and political restrictions.
Despite Mohammadi’s imprisonment, her campaign has not let up.
She expressed dismay at the surge in executions in Iran while supporting the protests that erupted after the September 2022 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in custody for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.
Mohammadi strongly opposed the Islamic Republic’s requirement that women wear hijab, and he violated hijab rules in prison.
“The Iranian people have turned a new page with this regime,” she told French newspaper Le Monde in an interview published Thursday. “I think people will be back on the streets sooner rather than later.”
Her comments come a day before Iran is due to hold elections for its parliament and assembly of key experts on Friday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
