Former political prisoner Ahmad Tamouei has been re-arrested by security forces in Tehran, nearly four years after completing a 14-year prison sentence.
An informed source who spoke to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), said: “Ahmad Tamouei, a Kurdish political activist from Salmas [in West Azerbaijan Province], was living in Tehran after his release from prison and was working as a Snapp driver. In the early hours of Monday, 23 February 2026, security forces arrested him in Tehran and took him to an undisclosed location.”
Tamouei, who had been released from Orumiyeh Central Prison in 2021, was beaten and arrested without a warrant, according to the source.
He was previously arrested on 24 October 2007 in Mahabad by the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and taken to the agency’s detention centre in Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province.
In an open letter addressed in 2016 to Ahmed Shaheed, then United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, he stated that he had been held in solitary confinement for two months in 2007 at the IRGC Intelligence Organisation detention centre in Orumiyeh on charges of “membership in PJAK” (the Kurdistan Free Life Party) and had been tortured.
According to the letter, he was tortured by means of “electric shocks”, “suspension”, “flogging”, and a “mock execution”.
In February 2008, Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Mahabad sentenced him to 15 years in prison and internal exile to Orumiyeh Central Prison on charges of “enmity against God” (moharebeh).
This sentence was upheld in summer 2008 and he was transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison to begin his sentence.
During his 14 years and two months in prison, he was repeatedly threatened and interrogated by the Intelligence Ministry’s special office based inside Orumiyeh Central Prison due to his participation in hunger strikes organised by political and religious prisoners.
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