By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Marzieh Nourmohammadi waited four months for word of her daughters. When she finally got a prison visit in May, she barely recognized them.
Taraneh and Romina Rahimi, twin sisters, were seized from their home in the dead of night by masked men later identified as agents of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to The Guardian. Their offense: joining millions of Iranians who took to the streets in January to protest the regime.
According to the account relayed by their mother, the twins endured beatings that left broken feet and torn-out hair. Taraneh told her mother that prison guards threatened to rape her sister Romina if she refused to sign a confession.
Both sisters have now been handed death sentences, The Guardian reports, though the exact charges underpinning the sentences and the current stage of any appeal were not detailed in available reporting. That gap matters — Iranian courts have a documented history of extracting confessions under duress and prosecuting protesters under vague national-security statutes, but the specifics of this case beyond the family's account have not been independently verified by outside monitors in the material reviewed here.
The January protests drew a heavy state response nationwide, part of a pattern stretching back years in which Iranian security forces have moved swiftly and brutally against dissent, particularly among young women. The Rahimi sisters were teenagers when detained.
What happens next depends on Iran's opaque judicial process, largely shielded from outside scrutiny. Death sentences for protest-related charges have been carried out before in Iran; they have also, under international pressure, sometimes been commuted. For a family that has already waited months just to learn if their daughters were alive, the waiting is not over.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE –
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."