Maziar Khosravi, a journalist, was arrested in 2010 and released on bail. In January 2020, his house was raided and searched by agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

House Raid

On Sunday January 26, 2020, Khosravi’s house was searched by the IRGC's Intelligence Protection Organization agents and some of his personal belongings were confiscated. 

It is still unknown why the IRGC's agents searched Khosrawi’s house and confiscated his belongings. However, according to the Emtedad News website, Khosravi had also been summoned to the Culture and Media Courts.

Emtedad News reported that IRGC agents had decided not to arrest the journalist on the day of the house raid but that he should report to the Culture and Media Courts.

In February 2020, after raiding Khosrawi’s home, IRGC agents also raided the homes of a number of other journalists and searched their homes for unknown reasons, confiscating some of their belongings.

On his Twitter account, Khosrawi wrote about the raid. In one of the last tweets, which he posted in January 2020, he criticized the silence of judicial officials concerning Hassan Abbasi's threatening remarks in which he called for Iran to detain Americans: “#Hassan_Abassi says ‘You want the problem solved? Arrest 10 or 20 Americans every month! Get $1 billion for each of them, $1 billion a week, $51 billion a year, take Iran’s domestic strength seriously!’ This was an official call to carry out hostage-taking. Doesn't this country have a prosecutor?!”

Detention Record

Maziar Khosrawi was arrested on February 11, 2011, by the agents from the Ministry of Intelligence at the editorial offices of Sharq newspaper when he was secretary of the publication’s international department. He was transferred to Evin Prison but after 13 days, on February 25, he was released from prison on bail.

In an unprecedented move, security officials also raided the offices of the Etemad, Bahar, Shargh, Arman and Aseman newspapers over the course of two weeks and arrested a number of journalists.

The Kaleme website reported at the time that according to Khosrawi’s family, he had been transferred to a hospital affiliated with the Ministry of Intelligence and then later admitted him to another hospital's intensive care unit.

During the arrests in February 2011, security forces then raided the homes of all detained journalists and took away some of their personal belongings, including books, laptops, and manuscripts.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, a spokesman for the judiciary and the attorney general, spoke to a news conference a week prior to the raids of the homes of the detained journalists claiming that “Based on the information that I have received from reliable sources, unfortunately a number of journalists who are currently writing for this country’s newspapers are being controlled by westerners and counter-revolutionaries. Tomorrow, if any of these people are arrested for criminal acts and you cry aloud about it unaware that these people are the enemies of people.”

Despite the fact that the reason for the arrests was not announced by the judiciary, the Mehr and Fars news agencies reported that the journalists had been arrested on charges of collaborating with "counter-revolutionaries."