Last Update

June 19, 2020

Organisation

Unknown

Gender

Male

Ethnic Group

Baloch

Religoius Group

Muslim

Province

Sistan and Baluchestan

Occupation

Social Media Activist

Sentence

10 years in prison

Status

Released

Institution investigating

Ministry of Intelligence

Charges

Acting against National Security
Dissemination of False Information

Sakhi Rigi Released

Sakhi Rigi, writer of the blog Baluchistan Glory, was arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. This was later reduced to a 10-year jail term on appeal.

Sakhi Rigi, writer of the blog Baluchistan Glory, was arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. This was later reduced to a 10-year jail term on appeal.

On June 18, 2009, Rigi, who was 31 at the time, was arrested in Zahedan, capital of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province, though details of the case against him were never disclosed to the media. The initial 20-year jail sentence was one of the most severe sentences to be handed down against a blogger in Iran.

Reporters Without Borders said at the time that Rigi was “a victim of Iran’s unjust court system.”

Foreign media coverage was reportedly one of the reasons that the court issued such a severe sentence against him. Rigi shared a surname with Abdul-Malik Rigi, leader of the armed Sunni Muslim opposition group Jundallah, which opposes the Islamic Republic of Iran. Rigi was tortured and coerced into confessing that he affiliated with this group.

Rigi was charged with waging a “war against God and the state” by collaborating with Jundallah, “insulting state officials,” “spreading falsehoods” and taking other “actions against the state.” He was also fined 18 million rials for “forgery and the use of forged documents.”

No evidence for these accusations was ever produced in court. Despite this, state-affiliated media justified the harsh sentence against Rigi by repeating the prosecutor’s claims that he had collaborated with the Sunni opposition group.

Peyman Roshan Zamir, a blogger who was imprisoned in Karoun Prison in Ahvaz, later published a number of exposés about the conditions at the prison. The exposés later became the basis of wider research concerning conditions in Iranian prisons. In one of Zamir’s reports, concerning Rigi, he wrote that “Another blogger who is imprisoned in Karoun Prison is Sakhi Rigi. He was the admin of the Balochistan Glory blog. His only crime was that he re-published news and stories from a number of websites including BBC and Radio Farda. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and then transferred from Zahedan Prison to Karoun Prison in Ahvaz. While he was being tortured, Sakhi Rigi confessed that the articles, which had been published on other websites before it had been shared on his blog, was actually given to him by a foreign source. He confessed to having received the information from this source and that his blog was the first site to publish this news. It was this unrealistic confession that became the basis for the verdict. The only evidence for the court’s judgement in his case were his blog posts and his own confession. Initially, Sakhi Rigi had been harshly sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in part because he shared the same family name as Abdul-Malik Rigi.”

In March 2019, Rigi’s 20 year prison sentence was reduced to 10 years in prison.

In July 2019, after the reduction in his prison sentence, Rigi went on hunger strike in protest against judicial officials who did not grant him any prison leave or conditional parole. Although Rigi was eligible, prison officials were opposed to giving him any form of leave from prison. Some of these objections have been attributed by the media to the Intelligence Administration of the Sistan and Baluchistan province and other provincial officials.

In March 2018, Rigi wrote a letter about his time in prison, saying that “The interrogators, during my arrest, referred to a comment on my blog from some unknown individual, which I’m not sure anyone except the interrogators had even read. The comment itself was a copy of content that had previously appeared on other pages. I was then tortured concerning that comment in multiple interrogations, in the most severe way, so that I would reveal to them who wrote the comment. I was willing to confess to all of the crimes that anyone had committed in the city just to make the torture stop. But I didn’t know who had posted the comment. That same comment was the basis of the two accusations of ‘war against God and the state’ and ‘disclosing classified information’ that were entered against me in court. Eventually, I was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Ahvaz for simply having created that blog.”

Eventually, on July 15, 2019, Sakhi Rigi was released from the Central Ahvaz Prison after having endured 10 years in prison without leave. He has since returned to his birthplace of Zahedan.

 

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