It was early in the morning the day after Christmas. It was cold. Mehdi Forootan sat in the back seat of an undercover police car in front of his house in Tehran, Iran.
An officer pointed a camcorder at him. “Do you know why you were arrested?” the officer asked him.
“No,” Forootan said.
The officer turned off the camera and looked Forootan in the eyes.
“I can beat you until blood is coming out of your mouth and every part of you. The next time I turn on the camera, you tell me why we are taking you,” the officer said and turned the camera back on.
Forootan spoke of his faith in Christ, and he spent the next 105 days in Iran’s harshest prison.
On Dec. 26, 2010, authorities had arrested Forootan in a wave of persecution against Iran’s underground church; more than three months later, he was one of a few who had not been released.
During one interrogation, an officer turned on a camcorder and pointed it toward him, demanding that Forootan tell him about his “crime.”
Forootan began to tell him how he had struggled with substance abuse as a teenager, “and how when I was in university I found Jesus and He saved me, and I have been free ever since. But he became angry and turned off the camera. He said: ‘I asked you to tell about your crime, not evangelize us.’”
After months of trying to get him to write statements confessing a crime, authorities inexplicably released him.
Forootan said his first month out of prison was one of the worst of his life.
He couldn’t speak to anyone of his prison experience for fear that authorities were watching and would re-arrest him.
His parents had given the deed of their house to authorities as bail. He and his fiancée decided it was best for him to leave Iran and go to Turkey as a refugee, which he did.
This meant an illegal escape through the mountains, because authorities had confiscated his passport. (CDN)
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