Photo: Abdorrahman Boroumand Center
Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh
محمدجعفر پوینده
1954–1998 · 28 years ago
- Born
- 1954
- Taken
- 9 December 1998
- Age
- 44 years old
- From
- Shahriar, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh was born in 1954 in Ashkezar, in Yazd, into a poor family, and from the age of ten he worked alongside his schooling. He studied law at Tehran University, then sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he earned a master's degree, and came home in 1978.
From the age of 25 he translated from French into Persian: more than 20 books, on women's rights, discrimination, human rights and Marxism. Colleagues remember a thorough translator who some days worked twenty hours at his old desk. He dedicated his translation of Leah Levin's Human Rights: Questions and Answers to the women and men who fight for human rights; it came out on Human Rights Day, 10 December 1998, the day his body was found. He was also one of the people who brought the Iranian Writers' Association back to life.
Any legal restraint on the freedom of expression leads to the repression of thoughts and ideas. Limiting freedom of expression should be beyond the reach of political regimes.
How the regime took them
On the afternoon of 9 December 1998 he left home for a publishers' meeting and never arrived. According to his wife, agents of the Ministry of Intelligence seized him on Iranshahr Street in Tehran, beat him and strangled him. His body was found the next day near the village of Badamak, in the Shahriar area outside Karaj, and his family identified him on 11 December.
A few weeks earlier the Revolutionary Prosecutor's Office had summoned him with Mohammad Mokhtari and other organisers of the Writers' Association. The Ministry of Intelligence later admitted that its own officials were behind the killings and blamed 'rogue elements'.
Sources
- Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Omid memorial
- Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, Omid memorial (Persian)
- Iran International (Persian), security agents block the Mokhtari and Pouyandeh memorial, 16 Azar 1403
- Radio Farda, the Mokhtari and Pouyandeh anniversary held in silence (2008)
Checked 12 November 2026
