IRAN: Ahmadinejad aide proposes Evin Prison diet plan

What better way to spend a few weeks inside the solitary confinement ward of an Iranian prison than to shed some excess pounds?

A close aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist critic of the president, appeared so gaunt during his televised confession this month because he himself had decided to take off some weight.

"It's natural that when someone has become fat, in prison he understands that his fatness harmed his body and spirit," said Ali Akbar Javanfekr (left)."So maybe Mr. Abtahi took advantage of this opportunity to lose weight."

The president's advisor on media affairs spoke to the Iranian Labor News Agency. 

Observers were stunned when Abtahi (above), who served as a vice president for former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, publicly confessed to conspiring against Ahmadinejad.

It wasn't just that his words appeared to be copied verbatim from Iran's hardline press. But the 51-year-old looked terrible.

He had just spent weeks under interrogation and in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer. The mid-ranking cleric appeared gaunt, withdrawn and without his turban.  

By most accounts, Evin Prison is an unlikely self-help venue. 

The wife of jailed dissident journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi told a reformist website Saturday that her husband had told her during a recent jailhouse visit that he had contracted "dementia" while in solitary confinement in the massive prison complex. 

He had been locked up in a tomb-like box for refusing to confess to being part of a Western-backed conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic in the wake of Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 reelection. 

"Mr. Zeidabadi says he was being held in a grave," she told Etemadmelli.ir. "He had attempted suicide, but he had found nothing to do it with. He had then started screaming, and the prison guards had found he was going insane and they moved him to solitary confinement cell."

She also said her husband had lost weight.

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photos: Above, Abtahi in June 2009 (left) and this month. (Credit: Iranian news agencies). Below, Abbas Javanfekr (Credit: AFP/Getty Images).

Comments

[Green Tea Fat Burn]

Nice post, thanks for sharing this wonderful and useful information with us.

Green Tea

[Azad Am]

No one was shocked at Mr. Abtahi's confession... The Regime only allows for confessions to be heard, as shown by the imprisonment of the dissident journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi because of his refusal to falsely confess. The trail is rehearsed, and is void of any justice.

[Arash Zahedani]

@JohnRJ08

we, the Iranian people, are not trying and have a desire to rationlize these nonsense. If we were, we wouldn't be dying in streets, raped in prisons and humiliated in TV shows.

There are a power thirsty and brutal minority which for reasons unknown to me, have been ruling this country for more than 30 years, and have killed thousands of people, raped thousands of girls and boys, to remain where they are.

so please do not attribute everything to "the Iranian people"

[David Bickel]

I think that the religous right should be kick out of office. They are too religous for democratic rights go forward and equal rights for women.

I feel that IRAQ has been more democratic than other countries in the region aside from Israel.

Equality should be equal around the world. The only countries that are kind of okay are China with their one child per couple. Also in India, they should get past this idea that cows should be allowed walk anywhere.

Cows let of lots of a gas that is not good for our ozone layer protecting our planet from the Sun.

Acualy, the USA is not better with all of car, trucks, buses, motorcycles, boats, cigarete smokers, etc...

[Omid]

Sorry, "Collis Huntington," but your comment in defense of the Islamic Republic's cruelties is thinly veiled anti-Iranian propaganda that is an insult to all of us, not least the ordinary people of Iran who are jailed and beaten and tortured by Ahmadinejad and his fellow coup supporters.

[JohnRJ08]

Right out of the Dark Ages. One has to wonder how much longer the Iranian people will be able to rationalize this kind of behavior by their leaders. It makes them look stupid and compliant. Until Iran becomes a secular state, rather than an "Islamic Republic", these atrocities are going to be common place.

[Collis Huntington]

This sort of thinly veiled anti-Iranian propaganda is an insult to all of us.