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A group of academics Wednesday expressed “solidarity” with an Iranian sociologist who obtained her PhD in France, after she was detained in Iran last month following the start of mass protests.
The Paris-based EPHE research institute last week called for the release of Morvarid Ayaz, who it said had studied at the institute and been “detained on September 21 in Rasht in northwest Iran”.
Iran has erupted in protests following the death on September 16 of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police.
A support group for another detained academic, French-Iranian Fariba Adelkhah, on Wednesday expressed “its full solidarity with Morvarid Ayaz… who seems to have been detained in Rasht, as well as with our Iranian colleagues and their students who are being hit by brutal repression in many of the country’s universities”.
The EPHE on Friday last week reported Ayaz’s husband Arash Naimian as saying the academic had been summoned to the police station then detained, before being transferred several days later to the capital Tehran.
“Today nobody knows where exactly she is,” the EPHE quoted him as saying. It was not immediately clear if Ayaz had any other nationality.
She had been living in Iran since 2017, the research institute has said.
France’s Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna has said five French citizens are being held in Iran.
They include Adelkhah, the French-Iranian researcher, who was arrested in June 2019 and later sentenced to five years in prison for undermining national security — allegations her family has strongly denied.
Another French national held in Iran, Benjamin Briere, was arrested in May 2020 and later sentenced to more than eight years in prison for espionage, charges he rejects.
French teachers’ union official Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris were also detained in May 2022, accused of seeking to stir labour unrest during teachers’ strikes.
Their alleged “confessions” were released last week.
The fifth is a “Frenchman who was passing through Tehran” and was recently arrested, the ministry said.