Prominent political figure Ezatollah Sahabi dies at 81

After six decades of activism, veteran political figure Ezatollah Sahabi died on Tuesday at the age of 81.

Sahabi, who headed the Council of Nationalist-Religious Activists, suffered from a stroke on 30 April. He had been in a state of coma for a month until his passing on Tuesday morning.

Shortly after the Islamic Revolution in February 1979, Sahabi was appointed as a member of the Council of the Islamic Revolution. Later, Mahdi Bazargan, Iran’s interim head of state at the time, appointed Sahabi as chief of budget.

Sahabi later ran for parliament (Majlis) and represented the people of Tehran in the first post-revolution Majlis from 1980-84.

Altogether, the prominent reformer spent more than fifteen years of his life in prison, both before and after the 1979 revolution.

In the early 1990s, Sahabi began publishing the “Irane Farda” (“Iran of tomorrow”) magazine, which was finally banned after he was arrested along with around forty other nationalist-religious figures, in spring 2000. After enduring two years of imprisonment, Sahabi was finally released on a heavy bail of two millions Rials (around 119,000 US dollars at the time). He was subsequently sentenced to eleven years in jail.

During the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election, Sahabi was a vocal supporter of the opposition Green Movement. He had been summoned and threatened by the intelligence apparatus, and was later sentenced to two years in prison.

In addition, Sahabi’s daughter Haleh Sahabi, was arrested in August 2009, and later sentenced to two years in prison. In January 2011, she was summoned to prison in order to serve her jail term.

GVF