Jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winnerNarges Mohammadicould die in prison unless she is urgently given proper health care after suffering two suspected heart attacks in recent weeks, supporters warned on Tuesday.
Representatives of her Paris-based support committee said Mohammadi, who won the 2023 peace prize for her decades of campaigning for human rights in Iran, said she was fighting for her life after being hospitalised under guard for the last five days due to her heart condition.
“We are not just fighting for the freedom of Narges, we are fighting so that her heart continues to beat,” said her lawyer Chirinne Ardakani at a news conference of her supporters, adding that Mohmamadi was now “between life and death”.
She compared Mohammadi’s plight to that of Chinese dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died under guard in 2017, and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison camp in 2024 in what his supporters described as state-sanctioned murder.
Jonathan Dagher of Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which is part of Mohammadi’s support committee, said: “This is the first time we are saying that she is between life and death, that there is a risk of death.”
“We must act before it is too late,” he added.
Mohammadi, 54, who has spent much of the past two decades in and out of prison for her activism, was arrested most recently in December after denouncing the Islamic republic at a funeral for a lawyer.
Already suffering from a heart condition, she had two suspected heart attacks, one on March 24 and another on May 1, in prison in Zanjan in northern Iran, according to her supporters.
After the most recent incident, she was rushed to hospital in Zanjan for treatment but remained under constant guard, Ardakani said.
Mohammadi is experiencing an “unprecedented degradation” of her health, said Ardakani.
Source: Insider Paper
