Mohsen Ruholamini was not a radical. He was the son of a conservative politician who had supported the pragmatic presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaee. After the disputed 2009 presidential election, he was swept up in mass arrests and delivered to the Kahrizak Detention Center, an underground facility south of Tehran with a nominal capacity of 50 prisoners. The medical report that would eventually document his death stated the cause as "physical stress, the effects of being held in bad conditions, multiple blows and severe injuries to the body." The physician who wrote that report, Ramin Pourandarjani, would soon die himself under mysterious circumstances at police headquarters. Kahrizak was not the only site of abuse during the 2009 crackdown, but it became the one whose horrors could not be denied, even by the system that created it.
Authorities planned the Kahrizak detention center in 2001. Its cells were underground, built without adequate ventilation or toilet facilities. Under Tehran police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan, the facility became central to the "Public Security Plan," a campaign ostensibly targeting drug addicts and people deemed threats to public morality. Reports of inhumane conditions emerged years before the 2009 crisis. Some accounts compared Kahrizak unfavorably to Ward 209 of Evin Prison, itself notorious as a site of political detention. Opposition groups published reports alleging as many as 6,000 deaths inside the facility during 2007 and 2008 alone, though these figures remained unverified. What was clear even before the election crisis was that Kahrizak represented something beyond ordinary detention. It was a place designed to break people.
After Iran's disputed June 2009 presidential election, thousands of protesters and activists were arrested. Security chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam stated on state television that only the most dangerous offenders would be sent to Kahrizak, but he also admitted that many of the 140 prisoners held there were low-priority suspects. Tehran riot police and Basij paramilitaries used Kahrizak alongside other facilities, including the Level -4 detention center in the Interior Ministry building, to hold people charged with endangering national security. The detainees included students, activists, and bystanders caught in the sweeps. Among them was Ruholamini, whose family connections to the conservative establishment would eventually make his death impossible for the government to dismiss.
Released prisoners described cramped, squalid underground cells where guards routinely beat detainees. Some were beaten to death. Ahmad-Reza Radan was alleged to have personally participated in daily beatings, though the security chief denied these reports. Mohsen Ruholamini and Amir Javadifar were among those who died. Javadifar's autopsy attributed his death to blunt trauma from severe beating. Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani documented the abuse in Ruholamini's medical report, providing an official record of torture-related death within the system itself. He then died at police headquarters under circumstances that authorities attributed to heart failure. The timing and location of his death deepened suspicions that the evidence he had created made him a liability.
The abuses at Kahrizak crossed a line that even parts of Iran's establishment could not tolerate. Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri demanded prosecution of those responsible. "Can the government deceive people by closing a detention center and blaming all the faults on a building?" he asked. Grand Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani spoke of "sorrowful acts committed in the name of the regime and under the banner of God." Conservative politician Ali Motahhari expressed public concern. Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi wrote to parliament speaker Ali Larijani offering to present evidence of sexual abuse at Kahrizak. The response from the judiciary was to demand Karroubi's arrest. But the death of Ruholamini, a conservative's son, forced action. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered Kahrizak closed. Three wardens were arrested. A parliamentary committee implicated Tehran prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi. President Ahmadinejad appointed Mortazavi as a special advisor days before the report was issued, an apparent attempt to shield him. In September 2016, Mortazavi issued a public apology for the killings.
Located at 35.35N, 51.85E in the Kahrizak district south of metropolitan Tehran. The facility is in an area of Tehran's southern outskirts that transitions from dense urban development to more industrial and semi-rural landscape. Nearest airports: Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport (OIIE) approximately 25 km southwest, Tehran Mehrabad International Airport (OIII) approximately 25 km to the north. The area is not visually distinctive from altitude, as the detention center's underground cells leave minimal surface footprint. Best context is gained at 5,000-8,000 feet AGL where Tehran's southern sprawl and its relationship to the city center become visible.