Tehran (AsiaNews) – The lives of the three students from the Polytechnic University of Amir Kabir in Tehran are in “great danger”. The students who had protested against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad December last are currently being held in the notorious Evin prison. The alarm was launched by the Islamic Association of Amir Kabir (Polytechinc) University, carried yesterday on the website Rooz.

The association warns that Tehran’s general prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, refuses to follow the directives of the head of judiciary, Hashemi Shahroudi, calling for the immediate release of the students. Moreover, he has “moved the students to solitary confinement and revoked their visitation and phone privileges, probably instigating a new round of torture and intimidation”.

August 22 the families of the 3 students– Ghassaban, Mansouri and Tavakkoli – met with Mortazavi. The father of one of the detained students told Radio Farda that while admitting that he had not yet read the case file the general prosecutor had announced his certainty that “the students were behind publishing the insulting material.”  The witness accounts of other students released from Evin tells that the three have been subjected to physical and psychological torture.

Some analysts read Mortazavi’s behaviour as a sign of a “factional infighting within Iran’s judiciary”, between a reformists and conservatives; but according to AsiaNews sources, “the whole situation is part of a well studied cover-up to convince public and international opinion that pluralism exists in Iran and that a democratic difference of opinion is possible”. “But it is really impossible – they explain – to believe that in a regime like the Iranian regime, the general prosecutor can get away with disobeying the orders of his superior”. “On the issue of Human Rights and not only – the add – Iran continues to lead the West on, at the expense of its people”.