Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi arrested in Iran, say supporters

Original article by Staff and agencies

Iranian security forces have “violently” arrested the 2023 Nobel peace prize winner Narges Mohammadi at a memorial ceremony for a lawyer and human rights advocate, her supporters said.

Mohammadi, who was granted temporary leave from prison in December 2024 on medical grounds, was detained along with several other activists at the ceremony for Khosro Alikordi, who was found dead in his office last week, her foundation wrote on X.

Also on X, Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, who is based in Paris, said she had been arrested at the ceremony in the eastern city of Mashhad along with Sepideh Gholian, also a prominent activist.

There was no immediate comment from Iran over its detention of Mohammadi, 53. However, supporters had cautioned for months she was at risk of being put back into prison. It was not clear if authorities would immediately return her to prison to serve the rest of her term.

The Narges Foundation said her brother Mehdi Mohammadi was present at the event and confirmed her arrest.

Alikordi was found dead earlier this month in his office, with officials in Razavi Khorasan province describing his death as a heart attack. However, a tightening security crackdown coincided with his death, raising questions. More than 80 lawyers have signed a statement demanding more information.

“Alikordi was a prominent figure among Iran’s community of human rights defenders,” the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran said on Thursday. “Over the past several years, he had been repeatedly arrested, harassed and threatened by security and judicial forces.”

Footage purportedly of the ceremony showed Mohammadi at a microphone, calling out to the crowd gathered, without wearing a hijab or headscarf. She started the crowd chanting the name of Majidreza Rahnavard, a man whom authorities hanged from a crane in a public execution in 2022.

Prior to her release last December Mohammadi had been imprisoned since November 2021 for convictions in relation to her campaign against capital punishment and the obligatory hijab in Iran.

She suffered multiple heart attacks while imprisoned before undergoing emergency surgery in 2022, her supporters say. Her lawyer in late 2024 revealed doctors had found a bone lesion that they feared could be cancerous, which was later removed.

Mohammadi’s sentence was supposed to be suspended for three weeks but her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.

She kept up her activism with public protests and international media appearances, including demonstrating at one point in front of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where she had been held.

An engineer by training, Mohammadi has been imprisoned 13 times and convicted five times. In total, she has been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison.

Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report