ICC Note: A raid on Christmas day at a gathering of Christians has put nine more Christians behind bars in Iran. The Iranian intelligence community continues to treat the gathering of Christians to worship as a threat to “national security” and will regularly raid gatherings and arrest Christians. At present nearly 100 Christians are currently in detention by Iranian leaders.
12/29/2015 Iran (NCRI) – Iran’s fundamentalist regime arrested a group of practicing Iranian Christians on Christmas Day at an in-house church in the city of Shiraz, southern Iran.
The group of Iranian Christians had gathered together last Friday, December 25, to celebrate Christmas when plain-clothes agents of the Iranian regime’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) raided the in-house church.
Armed MOIS agents ransacked much of the place and confiscated personal items and satellite dishes, according to eye-witness reports, which also said that the agents behaved ‘offensively’ towards those detained.
Among those arrested were:
Mohsen Javadi,
Elaheh Izadi,
Ahmad Golshani-Nia,
Reza Mohammadi,
Mahmoud Salehi,
Moussa Sari-Pour,
Alireza Ali-Qanbari,
Mohammad-Reza Soltanian,
And a ninth person whose identity was not established.
Separately on Wednesday, December 23, MOIS agents in the central city of Isfahan arrested Iranian Christian Mr. Meysam Hojjati in a raid on his home.
Mr. Hojjati was beaten and handcuffed while his home was searched and ransacked by four plain-clothes MOIS agents. His books, computer, mobile phone and even his decorated Christmas tree were confiscated. Mr. Hojjati was previously arrested by agents of the intelligence ministry in March 2012.
On the news of the Christians’ arrests, Shahin Gobadi of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) on Tuesday said: “There has been a steady deterioration of human rights abuses in Iran during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as president including executions and suppression of religious and ethnic minorities. This is just another case in point. Actually the clerical regime is one of the top violators of rights of religious minorities including Christians in the world. The regime has institutionalized repression of the Iranian people as the main tool of its survival.”
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