Spy Merchants: Spying on dissent through illegal means
April 10, 2017
Over four months, our undercover reporter posed as a buyer for clients from countries like Iran and South Sudan.
Abbas Hakimzadeh’s jail cell was bleak. High walls, one sink and a window. Just enough light crept in to distinguish between morning and night.
This was solitary confinement in Iran in 2009. The government was in the thick of the largest crackdown on political dissent since the 1979 revolution, jailing scores of protesters, intellectuals, and journalists.
Hakimzadeh spent 120 days living like this, not seeing family or friends – just prison guards and interrogators, who occasionally beat him.
Publishing a student newsletter critical of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Amirkabir University in Tehran had seen the computer science student thrown into jail.
“The guards lined us up against the wall, put blindfolds on us and we waited for them to take us to our cells,” Hakimzadeh, now 34, told Al Jazeera.
