Disappeared Iranian blogger and actress “Kidnapped by Tehran’s secret services”

BERLIN – Pegah Ahangarani, 27, is a dissident and an actress who has often played roles unwelcome in Islamic tradition: three good reasons to end up in handcuffs in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. According to the Farsi language service of the Deutsche Welle, Iranian intelligence agents arrested her a few hours before leaving for Germany, where Pegah was supposed to participate in television programs on the women’s soccer World Cup: “People close to her – reports the report – they said she was arrested. Ahangarani should have commented on the progress of the World Cup on Deutsche Welle. ”

Pegah had already been a German radio blogger during the Berlinale in February 2009, a few months before participating in the motions against Ahmadinejad’s election as president of the Republic. Gesture that made her disliked by the regime. Nothing more is known about her from the moment she called the family to communicate that she had been arrested: she said she had no idea where she was, nor of what offenses she was accused. Daughter of two famous directors in Iran, Jamshid Ahangarani and Manijeh Hekmat, already at the age of 15 she played the role of a rebellious girl in search of a boyfriend.

Last June another activist who was supposed to attend the World Cup in Germany ended up in handcuffs. Maryam Majd, photographer and activist long engaged in battles to allow Iranians to enter stadiums to watch sporting events, she would have to travel to Germany to collect material for a book on the relationship between women and sport.

Remaining in the world of cinema, last year the director Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and to the twenty-year ban on making films. The same duration of the sentence also for his colleague Mohammad Rasoulof. The actor Rami Parchami, who instead had been in solidarity with the Arab spring, was arrested and has been in prison since last February.

(16 July 2011)