In Evin Prison

In​ the early morning of 23 June, the day before Iran and Israel agreed a ceasefire, Israel bombed Evin Prison in Tehran, killing at least 79 people. It was the deadliest attack on a single target during the twelve-day war. Evin seemed a strange place to choose. Many of its inmates are political dissidents, or foreign or dual-national prisoners accused of espionage; Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe spent five years there. The reasons for the strike remain murky. Israel said the prison was a ‘symbol’ of the state and claimed that intelligence operations were run from there. Some people speculated that Israel wanted to encourage an uprising. Whatever the reason, the attack came as a surprise to Iranians. Ali Asadollahi, a poet and former political prisoner in Evin, had reassured relatives worried about his sister, who was being held there, that it was the last place Israel would strike.

Anisha Asadollahi is a workers’ rights advocate who was first arrested in 2019. She was arrested again in May 2022 with her husband and accused of conspiring with two French tourists whom the Iranian government had detained as spies. Her family heard nothing for forty days. Later, she told them that she had been held in solitary confinement and harshly interrogated. A year after that, she was arrested once more at a workers’ syndicate meeting, accused of ‘propaganda against the regime’ and ‘collusion against national security’, and sentenced to five years in Evin. She was two years into her sentence when Israel launched its attack.

The explosion was so powerful that debris landed on the Yadegar-e-Emam Expressway, a few hundred feet from where the main gate had previously stood. The security forces were already on the scene when Ali arrived. Heavily armed men on motorbikes were cordoning off the area and pushing back the crowd. Ali headed for the northern gate near the Kachouyi building, where prisoners’ families came for visits. The damage there was worse. Cars had been mangled; buildings inside and outside the prison compound had been destroyed; windows along the block were blown out. The ground was littered with bodies. Evin Hills is a busy neighbourhood, with lots of restaurants and residential buildings, and many civilians were in the area at the time of the attack.

Anisha’s husband, Kayvan Mohtadi, who had been released from Evin a year earlier, was in their apartment in Velenjak, not far from the prison, when he heard the blast. From the window, he could see three massive columns of smoke and, suspecting that Evin had been hit, drove straight towards them. He had spent more than two years there, almost three months of it in solitary confinement, enduring midnight interrogations and psychological torture. The first people he saw when he arrived were plain-clothes security officers, some of whom he recognised. Kayvan had often thought about what he would do if he saw his tormentors out in the world, on an equal footing. But now he couldn’t summon any anger. The head guard in Section 4, where he had served most of his sentence, appeared, brushing dust from his uniform. He spotted Kayvan, embraced him and began to sob. Behind him, a few prisoners were trying to leave the compound. One of the guards raised his rifle. A senior officer stopped him. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘They’re from the financial crimes ward. Shoot only if you see political prisoners.’

Hours after the explosion, there were still no bulldozers at the southern gate. The guards and security forces cleared the rubble by hand. Once the path was wide enough for a car, police vehicles drove in, followed by ambulances. The security forces began demanding that the waiting relatives identify themselves, explain why they were there and who they knew inside. When Kayvan told an officer that his wife was a prisoner, the man snapped at him. ‘I lost friends and colleagues protecting outlaws like your wife,’ he said. ‘You should be grateful to the prison staff.’

Kayvan kept calling the communal phone used by the prisoners in Section 4. Finally, in the afternoon, it was answered by Farhad, one of his former cellmates. ‘Absolute chaos,’ Farhad said. The front wall and door of Section 4 had been destroyed. Across the yard, the prison hospital had been razed to the ground. Crushed cars were scattered about and small fires burned everywhere. ‘It looks like Gaza,’ he said. He reassured Kayvan that the women’s ward hadn’t suffered major damage. The windows had shattered, which wasn’t surprising, since they were unusually large, more like those of a warehouse than a prison block. Relieved, Kayvan and Ali went home. But Kayvan, unable to sleep, returned a few hours later. There was a long line of buses in front of the main entrance. The prisoners were being moved – an unnerving sight in Iran, where political prisoners have a way of disappearing in such situations.

Anisha​ had been lying on her bunk when she heard a plane overhead. A few days earlier, two prisoners with experience in war zones had held a workshop on what to do during an air raid. If you heard a plane but no explosion, the danger had probably passed. But if you heard a second plane, you should take shelter immediately. Anisha waited. Then the second plane came. Blinding flashes filled the sky, followed by a series of explosions. Glass rained down on the prisoners, along with chunks of plaster from the ceiling. Balls of fire shot into the sky. The woman on the bunk above Anisha scrambled down, and they both curled into the foetal position. They counted four explosions. The blasts were so powerful that several prisoners suffered tinnitus for days.

They didn’t move for a few minutes. Some prisoners who had been in the exercise yard returned, wide-eyed. They had seen the planes overhead and had brought inside jagged pieces of shrapnel the size of their palms. Most of the sixty or so inmates of the women’s ward composed themselves and went to inspect the four rooms on the first floor where they spent most of their time. Their living quarters were largely intact, but the hallway and stairwell were full of concrete slabs and piles of broken bricks. At the far end of the corridor, behind several locked doors, were the guards’ offices. There was no sign of them.

The prisoners picked their way down the stairs to the area they called the Club. This had once been used for workshops and vocational training, but the women now did yoga and aerobics there. Only a small carpentry corner remained from the old set-up. Anticipating the smoke that soon filled the building, they had torn sheets into strips, which they soaked and kept ready to press over their faces. From the carpentry area, they took heavy wooden planks and used them to build makeshift shelters to crawl under if another round of missiles came.

More than an hour after the bombing, the guards finally came out of their offices. From behind a locked door they began shouting at the prisoners. ‘See?’ they yelled. ‘Israel’s after you too. We’ve been telling you, they want to kill all of us, but you won’t listen.’ An argument broke out. Then the air defence guns roared and the guards disappeared. The prisoners crammed themselves under the wooden shelters.

No one came to the women’s ward for the rest of the afternoon. The phones weren’t working. The prisoners later learned that the guards had cut the line. Water, electricity and gas had all been cut off too. There was no air-conditioning. The guards had locked all the doors, including the one to the exercise yard, so the women spent the sweltering afternoon in the smoke-filled ward. To pass the time, they picked up shards of glass and fallen plaster, dusted the furniture and swept the floors.

The guards returned late in the afternoon. The prisoners asked for water and were told that a tanker was on its way. Then came the real news: they were going to be moved. Another argument broke out. The women refused to go without being told where they were being taken, under what conditions and with what guarantees. They demanded that their families and the media be informed. The memory of 1988 was heavy in the air: under similarly chaotic conditions, more than five thousand political prisoners in Evin had been executed on government orders in less than a week.

A more senior officer arrived, one of the few who had a reputation for listening to the prisoners. He escorted the women out to the small exercise yard and pointed at the towers along the prison wall and the hills beyond. ‘There are snipers in all of them,’ he said. ‘They’ve been ordered to shoot at anything that moves.’ The prison, he added, was no longer functioning. There was no water, no power and hardly any guards. But stepping outside the ward would mean risking their lives.

Darkness fell. The promised water tanker never arrived. The prisoners gathered to discuss their situation. They were worried about leaving. Two of the women in the ward had been sentenced to death, and many feared that in the confusion of the transfer, the authorities might execute them, hoping no one would notice. But they felt they had no choice but to consent.

That night, they later discovered, the male prisoners had been transferred to Fashafuyeh, a prison south of Tehran notorious for its brutal conditions. At dawn, the women began to pack. Many of them had been in the prison for years, accumulating belongings: books, clothes, letters, small gifts, mementos from cellmates long gone. Now, they could take only what would fit in a single bag. They were handcuffed in pairs and led out over the debris, their steps muffled. They left the compound through a hole in the wall carved out by bulldozers and boarded the buses in silence. They were taken across Tehran to Qarchak Prison in Varamin, which houses women convicted of violent crimes. The prison is over-capacity, so the women from Evin remain, more than a month later, in the quarantine ward, where inmates usually wait to be processed. Filthy and overcrowded, it has no kitchen, no clean bathrooms and almost no space to sleep.

The fate of Evin remains uncertain. Built in 1972 on the northern edge of Tehran, at the foot of the Alborz mountains, the prison is now surrounded by the city, and developers are desperate to acquire the land. Long before Israel’s strikes, rumours had circulated that Evin was going to be shut down, but the city authorities couldn’t get the agreement of the security forces. The Israeli strike seemed to offer an opportunity, but it appears that closure has again been vetoed. The reconstruction of the damaged buildings has already begun.