A decade of injustice; the case of Saeed Malekpour

Canadian resident & Iranian national, Saeed Malekpour, has spent his 10th birthday behind bars at Iran’s notorious Evin prison. Saeed Malekpour,43, is an Iranian national who emigrated to Canada to pursue a bright future in web design and programming. In October 2008, he returned to Iran to see his dying father but was arrested by security forces on the street just days later. Saeed Malekpour had created an open source programme for uploading photos to the internet. The Cyber Crimes Unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps(IRGC) claimed that it was used on Iranian pornographic websites. However, Saeed maintains that the programme was used in this way withoud his knowledge. A year after his arrest, and after being subjected  to physical and psychological torture, Saeed Malekpour was forced to give a televised confession. In March 2010, Saeed Malekpour wrote a leetter from prison, explaining that his confession had been made under torture. Saeed wrote: ” I endured long solitary confinement…. while i remained blindfolded and handcuffed, several individuals armed with cables, batons, and their fists struck and punched me” The Islamic Revolutionary court used Saeed Malekpour s forced confession as evidence and sentenced him to death. Then in 2012 his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.