A. Ahang

A Journey Beyond Purgatory A. Ahang

Early in the year 1980, a year after Khomeini took power, a group of army and air force officers participated in a coup to overthrow the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. The plot was discovered a day before its execution, and in a frenzy, the government captured thousands of suspects from all over the country and flooded the prisons with army and air force personnel as well as many civilians. A few days after interrogating the captured, they continued to arrest thousands of suspects; many of them were innocents, who had nothing to do with the coup. Hundreds of those officers were executed, and the rest were kept in prison for a long period of time. This is the story of one of the innocent men whose crime was his close friendship with two of the army officers and was accused of being a part in the plot against the government. One early morning, a dozen of revolutionary guards invaded his house and took him away. During his six-month captivity, he was kept in solitude, was abused and tortured physically and mentally, and was moved from town to town to different prisons. His family and friends were kept unaware of his whereabouts, and members of his family were given the opportunity to pay him a visit only in the last month of his captivity. Among all those men, he was one of the lucky ones who were released and returned to the society, but he never had a normal life afterward. This is his horrifying experience in the prison of a fundamentalist religious regime