Whereabouts of 74-Year-Old Journalist Unknown Two Weeks after Arrest

Detained dissident journalist Keyvan Samimi has been held at an undisclosed location, incommunicado, for 14 days, his daughter says.

In a tweet on May 3, Adele Samimi said that the family has been denied information about the 74-year-old journalist’s whereabouts or his condition. 

She expressed concern about her father's health, saying he suffers from a heart condition.

The family still doesn’t know which prosecution branch is handling his case, she added.

"It has been 14 days since the arrest of Keyvan Samimi, and we still have no news about my father. They didn't even give him a phone to call and didn’t inform us of his location. If he hasn’t been kidnapped, what do you call what’s happened to him?" she asked. 

Samimi was arrested in Tehran on April 20 and taken to an undisclosed location, three months after his release from prison following two years of incarceration.

The journalist was scheduled to address on April 21 a virtual panel discussion called "Dialogue to Save Iran,” which was organized by a group of Iranian journalists and university professors.

A former editor of the now-banned intellectual magazine Iran-e Farda (Iran Tomorrow), Samimi has been imprisoned several times, before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

He was detained in December 2020 to serve a three-year sentence and was released in January this year.

In February 2022, Samimi was provisionally released from prison due to health issues but was re-incarcerated in May.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iranian authorities have arrested at least 95 other journalists since anti-government protests erupted across the country following the death in police custody of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini.