Maliki’s forces prevented holding religious rituals

After 328 days, the body of PMOI member Bardia Mostofian, which was held hostage by the Iraqi prime ministery committee (in charge of suppression of Ashraf residents), was buried on Monday, February 11 in Karbala. The Iraqi committee had held his body in cooperation with the mullah’s regime embassy in order to psychologically torture Camp Ashraf residents. Iraqi suppressive forces prevented parts of the religious customs of burial.
Mr. Bardia Amir Mostofian was a protected person under the Fourth Geneva Convention and in 2004 had received a “protected person” card and an identification card from the U.S. government. He was among the third group of Ashraf residents that Martin Kobler forced their relocation to Liberty with rush and insistence on the Persian New Year’s Eve of 2011. The displacement took place after 48 hours of intensive investigation, along with harassment and humiliation by criminals such as Major Ahmad Khozair and Captain Haydar Azab, who were perpetrators of two massacres in 2009 and 2011 respectively. Bardia Amir Mostofian died an hour after arriving in Liberty. The Iraqi physician found that the cause of death was cardiac arrest due to insomnia and fatigue. Were there not pressures from Martin Kobler and if he had given it a couple of days, this incident would not have happened.
The Ashraf Suppression Committee, under the pretext that Bardia did not have immediate family in Iraq, prevented the release of the body. Mr. Tahmoores Mostofian, Bardia’s brother who is a German resident, turned to Iraq’s Embassy and applied for a visa to travel to Iraq and get his brother’s body, but Iraqi officials did not let him to the embassy. He gave a power of attorney to one of the residents to bury the body. But when he went to the Iraq’ Embassy with his German lawyer to certify his power of attorney, neither he nor his lawyer were let in.
Mr. Mostofian inevitably hired Iraqi lawyers. In this regard, Iraqi lawyers and a representative of the residents went 35 and 20 times respectively to Baghdad’s Kerekh investigative court, a representative of the residents went 20 times to a police station to no avail. Representatives of the residents in 50 meetings with the Iraqi government and Iraqi officers, most of them taking place with the presence of UNAMI representatives and observers, called for the release and burial of Bardia’s body. This was one of the daily issues raised in contacts and communications of the residents with the UNAMI and U.S. Embassy officials in Baghdad. Liberty residents and their international, Iraqi and Arab representatives, lawyers and legal advisers called on American, Iraqi and UN officials in 300 letters for their immediate action.
During all this time, UNAMI refrained from taking any serious measures in this regard, and even refused to condemn this inhuman act.
The release of the body took 328 days. This was an inhumane, un-Islamic and unprecedented psychological torture, which could only be originated from the ruthlessness of the religious fascism and its agents in Iraq and deserves historical condemnation.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
February 12, 2013