NAIROBI, Kenya — Mohammad Azbari, a Christian convert from Islam who has fled to Kenya, knows what it’s like to be deported back to his native Iran.
When it happened in 2007, he said Iranian authorities pressured the government of Norway to return him and his wife, Gelanie, to Iran after hearing rumors that he had forsaken Islam.
“When we arrived in Iran, we were interrogated by security and severely beaten,” he said in Nairobi, where he and his family fought to persuade the Kenyan government to decline Iran’s demand to deport him back.
Azbari had been employed in the Iranian army before fleeing, he said, and authorities were monitoring his movements because they were concerned that he might betray his country and reveal government secrets. When he and his Christian wife, a native of the Philippines, first fled Iran in 2000, he was still a Shiite Muslim; he became a Christian in the Netherlands in 2003.
Azbari and his family were returned to Iran from Norway in 2007. Police began looking for him in October 2009 and he eventually made it into Kenya — where he was charged with illegal entry. On March 4, a court in Kenya ruled that Azbari’s family deserved asylum from religious persecution in Iran.
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