Osanloo hospitalised

14 February 2011

Osanloo hospitalised

Mansour Osanloo, the Iranian trade union leader unjustly imprisoned for the last four years, has been taken to an outside hospital after suffering chest pains this weekend that could be caused by a heart attack.

ITF general secretary David Cockroft stated: “Frankly, I believe that if he hadn’t had his life threatened, been beaten, arrested, re-arrested and held for years in awful Iranian prisons, he would today be a well man.”

“His maltreatment is part of a campaign to crush his voice and that of his trade union, the Vahed Syndicate. The blame for it lies with the government of Iran, a government that is today letting loose its so-called security forces against protesters in cities across the country.”

He concluded: “Hasn’t that government learnt from the experience of its neighbours: that no one is too powerful to be held to account, and that injustice – such as has been meted out to Mansour Osanloo – cannot be sustained indefinitely?”

In July 2007 Mansour Osanloo, now aged 50, president of the ITF-affiliated Vahed Syndicate (Tehran Bus Workers’ Union) was dragged from a Tehran bus by men who only later were identified as Iranian security forces. Three months later he was sentenced to five years imprisonment on charges of ‘acting against national security’ and ‘propaganda against the state’; in 2010 another year was added to his sentence. In reality his only ‘crime’ has been to help found a genuinely democratic trade union for his fellow bus drivers.

ENDS

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