Zahra (Ziba) Kazemi

زهرا (زیبا) کاظمی

2003 · 23 years ago

Taken: 11 July 2003
Age: 55 years old
From: Tehran, Tehran

Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.

Who did I miss? Tell me their name, and who they were.Say what you think, in Persian or English. Other readers can answer you.Discuss

Their life

Zahra Kazemi, known as Ziba, was born in Shiraz. She left Iran in 1974 for France, and in 1993 she settled in Montreal and became a Canadian citizen. She worked as a freelance photojournalist, with assignments in the West Bank, Jordan, Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, and most recently for the Montreal magazine Recto-Verso.

A colleague at the magazine said she would expose anything she felt was unjust, above all the conditions women lived in. In the summer of 2003 she was in Tehran with her camera when protests broke out.

How the regime took them

On 23 June 2003 she was arrested while photographing families waiting outside Evin Prison for news of people detained in the protests. She died in custody on 11 July. The regime's news agency first said she had had a stroke during interrogation; days later the Islamic Republic's vice-president conceded that she had died after being beaten. A former Defence Ministry physician who examined her later described a fractured skull and other signs of torture.

One intelligence agent was tried and acquitted, and the judiciary ruled her death an accident. The authorities refused her son's demand that her body be returned to Canada.