Arrested for Vagrancy 3 Years Ago : Shah’s Brother in Infamous Iranian Prison

Yamid Reza Pahlavi, a younger brother of the late Shah of Iran, grinned a toothless smile in the cell he shares with 23 other convicts in notorious Evin prison and said, “Things could be worse.”

Speaking in broken English to a group of foreign reporters on a conducted tour of the prison in north Tehran, he said he was serving a 10-year sentence “for a family reason” but refused to be more specific.

He said he had seven more years to serve.

Pahlavi, wearing a white T-shirt and gray pajama trousers, lay sprawled on blankets spread on the cell floor. There were no beds or any other furniture.

Prison officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the prisoner had been disowned as a drug addict by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi before the February, 1979, Islamic revolution toppled the monarchy.

Arrested for Vagrancy

The shah fled Iran a month earlier with other family members. He underwent medical treatment for cancer in the United States, then went to Panama and on to Egypt, where he died in July, 1980.

The officials said Yamid Reza Pahlavi was arrested as a vagrant and imprisoned three years ago.

“We are well-treated here,” Pahlavi, 58, said, adding that he was kept busy “gardening and looking after roses.”

Other inmates in his cell included a former general and senior officials of the shah’s regime who refused to give their names.

Meeting the shah’s brother was the highlight of a recent conducted tour arranged by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance.

In a bizarre incident, a Danish reporter was attacked by a prison guard while the group was inspecting a block of empty cells.

“I was walking down a corridor when suddenly this man started shouting in Farsi and then pushed me into a cell and started beating me up,” said Kurt Lyndorff, a correspondent for the Danish newspaper Jylands Posten.

Later, the guard, a bearded, middle-age man who refused to give his name, started shouting that all the reporters on the tour were CIA and KGB agents.

The guard later apologized and said he pushed Lyndorff into a cell because the reporter had refused to identify himself as part of the group.

Admitted for Elections

The mostly Western journalists were among a limited number allowed into Iran for the July 28 presidential elections.

The reporters were shown one of a dozen empty blocks of cells in the sprawling jail that held thousands of political prisoners in the Islamic revolution’s early days.

Prison officials said the block was vacated after an amnesty declared in February during celebrations of the revolution’s 10th anniversary.

Hundreds of “enemies of the revolution” reportedly were executed in the prison, set on a steep mountain slope in fashionable north Tehran, across a narrow wooded valley from a leading hotel, the Grand Azadi.

The reporters were shown another block containing 12 large cells, about 12 by 9 yards, each with 24 inmates. Each had a television set but no furniture. The prisoners sprawled on blankets, reading newspapers.

Officials escorting the journalists refused to say how many prisoners were in the jail. Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi said earlier at a news conference that the only political prisoners left in Evin were those serving life sentences for capital crimes.

Mohtashemi said most prisoners now were drug addicts or narcotics peddlers jailed during an anti-drug crackdown launched by the government in January.

The reporters also were shown the prison workshop, where inmates were making military uniforms and shoes.

The Guidance Ministry provided interpreters so reporters could converse with the prisoners. A few inmates spoke English.

All those interviewed said they were jailed for political offenses.

One prisoner who gave his name as Mohammed Aragi said he was a member of Iran’s outlawed Tudeh Communist Party.

He said a revolutionary court sentenced him to death on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment under another amnesty declared by the late revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Aragi, 56, said he also spent time in jail during the shah’s time for belonging to Tudeh but conditions were better under the Islamic regime.

“Things were far worse in the days of the shah. Prison guards used to beat us all the time. Now we’re well-treated and there are no beatings,” he said, speaking in Farsi through an interpreter.