A woman who fled Iran after alleging she had been raped in detention during its post-election upheaval has reported being physically attacked by Iranian agents while seeking refuge in Turkey.
Maryam Sabri, 21, said she was knocked to the ground, then kicked and punched by two men. She suffered bruising to her legs and back and was robbed of her mobile phone.
The incident happened last Saturday in Kayseri, central Turkey, where she is living while seeking asylum in the West.
Sabri has reported the assault to the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) and requested she be moved to another location. She fears she was targeted in revenge for her allegations against the Iranian authorities, although Turkish police have ruled out a political motive.
The alleged incident follows complaints by other Iranian exiles that agents of the Islamic regime have tried to intimidate them into silence since they escaped to Turkey after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election.
The attack on Sabri came two days after she repeated the rape allegations in an interview with the BBC. She said she was raped four times after being arrested at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on July 30 at a mourning ceremony for Neda Soltan, the young woman whose death at the hands of a sniper has become a symbol of the anti-government protests after it was captured on film.
Sabri told the Guardian: “Two men were walking behind me and one of them tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned, one of them slapped me on the face so hard that I fell. Then they started kicking and punching me on the legs and body. I didn’t get the chance to see their faces ... They didn’t say anything to me or to each other. They walked away quickly but calmly — they didn’t run.”
Sabri initially tried to hush up the incident out of fear. She acknowledged keeping it quiet when summoned by a local non-governmental organization, the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants (ASAM), which had heard about an incident. She later reported it to the UNHCR’s Turkish headquarters in Ankara.
Metin Corabatir, the UNHCR external affairs officer in Turkey, confirmed the incident, but described it as “an ordinary crime.”
“The ASAM people took the necessary action and their office didn’t find any political motivation. It was just a street crime, according to what ASAM found out from the police,” he said.
US officials, however, are understood to have responded by pressing the commission to speed up Sabri’s asylum application.
Iranian refugees have voiced concerns that the UNHCR and other agencies in Turkey are subject to intense lobbying by Iran to reject their applications for asylum.
One source said a file had been submitted to the UNHCR dismissing Sabri’s claims and describing her as “morally corrupt.”
Sabri said earlier this month her father and brother had been repeatedly detained and beaten in an effort to press her into returning to Iran.
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