Reports from Iran say a correspondent for a state-approved newspaper has been detained in a Tehran prison ward run by intelligence agents after she attended a rally by labor activists outside parliament.
In a series of tweets posted Thursday and Friday, colleagues of Marzieh Amiri at Iran’s Shargh Daily newspaper, which labels itself reformist, said she had been detained at Evin Prison’s Ward 209. The ward is run by Iran’s intelligence ministry.
Shargh Daily correspondent Sudabeh Rakhsh posted a Thursday tweet saying Amiri, whom she described as a friend, was arrested Wednesday at a rally held by thousands of labor activists outside Iran’s parliament to mark International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day.
In a Wednesday report, VOA sister network RFE/RL’s Radio Farda cited eyewitnesses as saying Iranian security forces arrested at least 35 people as they broke up the rally, beating some of those detained. Radio Farda said most of those detained were labor rights activists who had gathered peacefully to demand better working and living conditions.
In a report published Thursday, Iran’s Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) named Amiri as one of those who had been detained at the rally and transferred to Evin Prison’s Ward 209.
The Shargh Daily’s official Twitter account confirmed Amiri’s detention at the May Day rally in a Friday tweet, but said the newspaper still was trying to determine her location.
A reporter with another Iranian state-approved news outlet, Mohammad Bagherzadeh of the Shahrvand newspaper, posted a Thursday tweet saying Amiri had been arrested for doing her job as a journalist.
There did not appear to be any comments from Iranian officials about Amiri’s case in state media by late Friday.
In its annual report published last month, media rights group Reporters Without Borders said Iran slipped further toward the bottom of its World Press Freedom index because of an increase in arrests of Iranian journalists and citizen-journalists.
This article originated in VOA’s Persian service.
