Hamideh Shahrokhi Amiri is the 50th defendant in the court hearing the case of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). She has always been one of the group’s officials, a member of the group’s Elite Council. She has also worked as an interrogator-torturer.
Hamideh Shahrokhi, nicknamed Afsaneh, was one of the commanders of the MEK army in the Forough Javidan operation, the group’s cross border operation against its own country sponsored by Saddam Hussein.
His sister, Saeeda Shahrokhi, was also a member of the Cult of Rajavi, and she is considered one of the high-ranking officials of the group. In 1984, she married Massoud Kalani (anchor of the Mujahideen TV channel) in Paris. It was an organizational forced marriage. They were later forced to divorce under the order of Massoud Rajavi, as a ruling of the so-called Maryam ideological revolution.
Afsana was one of the officials who played an active and significant role in suppressing the members who wanted to defect the organization. She appointed her deputy, who was Zohra Akhyani in 1989 to 1990, to administer the meeting and suppress the dissidents.
Dariush Ghanavati is a former member of the MEK who encountered Hamideh Shahrokhi’s violence when he asked to leave the organization. He recounts: “Hamida Shahrokhi told me, do you want to go out? We do not send anyone abroad! I answered, what do I have to do with abroad? I want to return to Iran. He drew an arrow with a marker and said that one end of this arrow is a Mujahid and the other end is an Iranian revolutionary guard. Which one are you?! I said none. I want to go back to my family.”
“She started insulting and cursing and the rest of the crowd followed her,” Dariush continues. “They pressured me so much that I started crying. Then they took me to the southeast side of Camp Ashraf and imprisoned me in a Conex, called Bangal.”
Kambiz Bagherzadeh is another former member of the Cult of Rajavi who recalls Afsaneh as his torturer after he wrote a letter to Massoud Ragavi and asked him to let him leave the group in 1990. “They transferred me to a shanty-like room that we called Bengal, and I was there alone for about a month,” he writes in his memoirs. “I was only allowed to leave the place twice a day to use the restroom, and they kept a guard behind the Bengal door for me 24/7. The Bengal was actually a cell for solitary confinement.”
“Little by little, loneliness and mental pressure pressed me so much so that sometimes I actually thought of suicide!”, Kambiz recalls. “From the 20th day, they made me participate in meetings for those who wanted to leave the organization. Really nauseating meetings that were full of insulting, cursing, and spitting on the targeted person, and everyone was shouting and yelling so loud that no one could understand what others were saying. Everyone was shouting at the poor person! This was where Afsanah was the commander, all these crimes were committed under her orders and supervision.”
In 1993 and 1994, the MEK imprisoned about 700 members of the group under that accusation of being an agent of the Iranian intelligence. The imprisoned ones have been accused of such a charge because they had asked to leave the group or they had criticized the group’s ideology or leaders. According to the defector’s testimonies, Hamida Shahrokhi was one of the torturers in this story, who brutally harassed the disaffected forces as much as possible.