Friday 19th May, Shiraz, 54 Baha’is were arrested while carrying out a local project in schools with permission of the Islamic Council of Shiraz.
The charges are not yet clear but the arrests are all the more concerning due to the facts that most of those arrested are youth and this is one of the largest number of Bahá’ís taken at once since the 1980s. Several non-Bahá’í youth who were also involved in the project have been permitted to go free.
The Bahá’í World News Service has today (May 24th) officially reported that only one younger Bahá’í has been freed in addition to all of the non-Bahá’í participants, this disturbing confirmation follows unconfirmed reports that all the Bahá’ís had been released.
The BWNS also reveals that “The arrests coincided with raids on six Baha’i homes during which notebooks, computers, books, and other documents were confiscated. In the last 14 months, 72 Baha’is across Iran have been arrested and held for up to several weeks.”
Link: Full story and photo, 54 Baha’is arrested in Iran. [BWNS]
Link: The Growing Threat to Iran’s Baha’is
I have removed the claim in this article that the individuals arrested were involved in a UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) project, the source for that information was the Baha’i World News Service and they have now retracted that statement with an apology for having got it wrong.