Police picked up Sattar Beheshti, 35, from his home in the city of Robat-Karim in the southwest of Tehran last week.
His relatives said on Wednesday they had received phone calls from the prison authorities asking them to collect Beheshti's dead body from the notorious Kahrizak detention center on Thursday.
Beheshti's alleged death cannot be independently confirmed but Baztab, a news website close to Mohsen Rezaei, a senior politician, reported that the blogger has lost his life during interrogations.
"Sattar Beheshti, who was arrested by Fata [cyber] police, has died while being interrogated," Baztab reported. Iran is recently reported to have arrested a number of Facebook activists.
Although Facebook is blocked in the country, millions of Iranians access it through proxy websites or virtual private networks.
Sahamnews, a website close to the opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, said Beheshti had died "under torture" during an interrogation session with security officials.
"They called us today and asked us to collect his dead body tomorrow from Kahrizak," a family member told Sahamnews.
Kahrizak is a detention centre where Iran imprisoned many of the opposition activists caught up in the protests that followed the country's disputed presidential elections in 2009.
Before his arrest, Beheshti wrote in his blog: "They threatened me yesterday that my mother would wear black because I don't shut my mouth." [...]
Selvom det er fast kost i det iranske teokratur, er det altid chokerende at læse og høre om sådanne eksempler. Irans fængsler er fyldt med aktivister og almindelige borgere, som har udtalt sig mod regimet. Straffen er tortur ofte med døden til følge. Det anonyme iranske feministkollektiv Raha (som betyder "fri"), skriver sidste år i tidsskriftet Jadaliyya:
"Currently no form of independent organizing, political or economic, is tolerated in Iran. Attempts at organizing workers and labor unions have been particularly subject to violent repression. The crushing of the bus drivers’ union, one of the rare attempts at independent unionizing in the last few decades, is one of the better-known examples. The story of Mansour Osanloo, one of the main organizers of the syndicate, illustrates the incredible pressure and cruelty labor organizers and their families experience at the hands of the regime. In June 2010, his pregnant daughter-in-law was attacked and beaten up by pro-regime thugs while getting on subway. They took her with them by force and after hours of torture, left her under a bridge in Tehran. She was in dire health and had a miscarriage. These unofficial security forces continued to harass her at home in order to put psychological pressure on Osanloo, who is still in prison and is not yielding to the government’s demands to stop organizing. Currently, even conservative judiciary officials are complaining about violations of their authority by parallel security and military forces who arrest people, conduct interrogations and carry out torture, pressure judges to issue harsh sentences, and are implicated in the suspicious murders of dissidents. (In the past few months, not only political dissidents, but even physicians who have witnessed some of the tortures or consequences of them, have been murdered.)
No opposition parties are allowed to function. No independent media--no newspapers magazines, radio or television stations--can survive, other than websites that must constantly battle government censorship. The prisons are full of journalists and activists from across Iranian society. Conditions in Iran’s prisons are gruesome. Prisoners are deprived of any rights or a fair trial, a violation of Iranian law. After the election protests, killing, murder and rape of protesters and prisoners caused a scandal, which resulted in the closing of the notorious Kahrizak prison. Executions continue, however, as the government has meted out hundreds of death sentences in the last year. Iran has the second highest number of executions among all countries and the highest number per capita. In January 2011, executions soared to a rate of one every eight hours.
The women’s movement has been another major target of repression in the past few years. Dozens of activists have been arrested and imprisoned for conducting peaceful campaigns for legal equality; many have been forced to flee the country and many more are continually harassed and threatened. Women collecting signatures on a petition demanding the right to divorce and to child custody are often unfairly accused of “disturbing public order,” “threatening national security,” and “insulting religious values.” Ahmadinejad’s government employs a wide range of patriarchal discourses and policies designed to roll back even small gains achieved by women.
Ahmadinejad’s anti-immigrant positions and policies are the harshest of any administration in the past few decades. The largest forced return of Afghan immigrants happened under his government, ripping families apart and forcing thousands across the border (with many deaths reported in winter due to severe cold). Marriage between Iranians and Afghan immigrants is not allowed and Afghan children do not have any rights, not even to attend school. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s government has been repressive toward different ethnic groups in Iran, particularly Kurds. It is promoting a militarist Shia-Islamist-nationalist agenda and escalating Shia-Sunni divisions."