Photo: Hosseinronaghi, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Hosseinronaghi, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Baktash Abtin
بکتاش آبتین
2022 · 4 years ago
- Taken
- 8 January 2022
- Age
- 48 years old
- From
- Tehran, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Baktash Abtin was a poet, writer and documentary filmmaker, and a member of the board of the Iranian Writers' Association. The Association says he devoted his life to promoting freedom of speech and denouncing censorship in Iran, and that he published many books on history, sociology and literary criticism.
In 2021, while he was in prison, he shared the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award with two fellow members of the Association. PEN America called him a true champion of free expression and a steadfast leader of Iran's literary and human rights communities.
How the regime took them
In May 2019 he was sentenced to five years in prison for 'illegal assembly and collusion against national security' and one more for 'propaganda against the state', and on 26 September 2020 he began serving the sentence in Evin Prison. In 2021 a photo of him in his prison uniform, chained by the ankles to a hospital bed, caused an outcry. He caught Covid-19 in prison, was moved to hospital in mid-December 2021, was put into an induced coma, and died on 8 January 2022. PEN America said the regime had aided and abetted his death every step of the way. (Al Jazeera, CNN and The Guardian give his age as 48.)
