Facing a court case, Hamid Baghaei, the vice president under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has taken refuge in a holy shrine in Iran, a centuries-old form of protest undertaken by those seeking to escape oppression at the hands of rulers. On Oct. 15, Baghaei, along with former Ahmadinejad officials Ali Akbar Javanfekr and Habibollah Joz-Khorasani, took refuge at the Shah Abdol-Azim shrine in the historic city of Rey, just outside of Tehran.
A statement by the three individuals said there is “extreme judicial pressure to issue oppressive sentences” against them. The statement said the legal cases against them are based on “untrue and baseless accusations.” They said they faced “long periods of solitary confinement and hundreds of hours of intensive interrogations to acquire false confessions.”
