Unconfirmed reports are circulating in social media about the escape of a political prisoner, who used to work as an official of Iran’s Presidential Administration, from Tehran’s Evin prison.
Attorney Mohammad Moghimi said on Twitter on Wednesday that his former client Farhad Salmanpour Zahir has managed to "escape" from the prison.
“In a bold and clever move, he escaped from Evin prison with a very complex, technical, and stylish act after misleading” intelligence officers -- Moghimi said.
Salmanpour, who worked at the president's office under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was detained on August 21, 2019, by the intelligence ministry agents without any arrest warrant and was taken to Evin’s 209 ward, where he spent 45 days in solitary confinement. He had been imprisoned many times by the security agencies during the past years.
About two months later, human rights sources reported that Salmanpour was subjected to the most severe torture in order to obtain a forced confession about his relationship with Ruhollah Zam, a dissident journalist who was the director of the Amadnews Telegram channel before he was abducted in Iraq in 2019, and taken to Iran and hanged.
He reportedly faced new charges for informing about the suspicious death of another prisoner, Shahin Naseri.
