4/30/2024 Iran (International Christian Concern) — Mina Khajavi, a 60-year-old Christian convert serving a six-year prison sentence in Iran, is currently being deprived of necessary medical attention within Tehran’s Evin Prison. 

Despite suffering from arthritis and walking with a limp caused by an untreated broken ankle sustained in a car accident shortly before her imprisonment, Khajavi is being denied medical care by Iranian guards. This neglect has resulted in significant suffering for Khajavi, particularly as she must put pressure on her injured ankle when climbing to the second level of her bunk bed in her cell. 

Agents with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested Khajavi in part of a string of coordinated raids against house churches in June 2020. Authorities charged Khajavi with “acting against national security by promoting ‘Zionist’ Christianity,” and she began serving her sentence at the beginning of this year. Khajavi was arrested alongside several Christian converts, including Malihe Nazari and Joseph Shahbazian, both of whom have had their sentences reduced due to retrials — hope that Khajavi clings to as she seeks a retrial of her own. 

The conditions for Khajavi in Evin Prison, however, remain grim. 

Widely referred to as a “torture factory” and “hell on earth,” Evin Prison houses roughly 60% of Christians detained in Iran. Rather than house the scoundrels and dregs of society, the prison serves as punishment for anyone deemed a threat to national security and the Islamic regime: Christians, politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and artists. Or, more specifically, anyone who is a threat to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who squashes any faith or dissent that challenges the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Prisoners incarcerated in Evin live in dismal conditions. Wards are overcrowded and lack necessities. Inmates have reported more than 70 types of torture, according to a report published by the U.K. Those with health conditions, like Mina Khajavi, report medical neglect and abuse. 

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