Ruhollah Zam

روح‌الله زم

2020 · 6 years ago

Taken: 12 December 2020
From: Karaj, Alborz

Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.

Who did I miss? Tell me their name, and who they were.Say what you think, in Persian or English. Other readers can answer you.Discuss

Their life

Ruhollah Zam was the son of a reformist cleric. He was imprisoned in Iran after the disputed presidential election of 2009, left the country and was granted political asylum in France.

From Paris he ran Amadnews, a website and Telegram channel that shared videos of protests and damaging information about officials, and that played a large part in the coverage of the protests of 2017 and 2018. When Telegram suspended it, his team started a new channel, Sedaie Mardom, the Voice of the People, which drew more than 1.3 million subscribers within a week, many of them inside Iran. He called his work a mix of media and political activism, run on a very tight budget by a small team of exiles, and he denied any link to intelligence services.

We haven't been linked to any political group in the country. We don't spread the message of the reformists, or the conservatives, or the Guards, or Khamenei.

Telephone interview with RFE/RL, 4 January 2018

How the regime took them

In October 2019 the Revolutionary Guards announced that they had 'guided him into the country' in an intelligence operation; Iran Human Rights reports that he was seized in Iraq and taken to Iran. In 2020 a court convicted him of 'corruption on earth' for running Amadnews, which the regime accused of inciting the protests of 2017 and 2018. He was hanged on 12 December 2020; the Boroumand Center records the place as Rajaei Shahr Prison in Karaj. (BBC News gave his age as 46 in 2019, which does not match the birth year of 1978 given elsewhere.)