Editor’s Note: Warning: This article contains an explanation of torture.
Berlin
CNN
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Saman Yasin thought he was leaving prison. It was 5am and the guard had just told him to clean up his belongings. But the next thing he knew was that he was blindfolded with a rope around his neck.
“I think I was under that rope for about 15 minutes,” the Iranian-Kurdish rapper told CNN in an exclusive interview.
“I could say they brought the clergy, and he was reciting the Quran on my head… and he kept telling me, “Repent, and let you go to heaven.” ”
Yasin is currently in Berlin after a dangerous escape from Iran. He spoke exclusively to CNN about his light letter and how he said he used his guard to force him to confess a crime he said he didn’t commit.
Yasin spent two years in an Iranian prison in 2022 for being involved in protests against “women, life, freedom,” during which she joined street demonstrations and recorded anti-only songs.
The months-long uprising was caused by the death of 22-year-old Iranian and Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September after she was arrested for allegedly not observing Iran’s forced hijab laws.
According to a UN report, protesters encountered brutal forces. This cites “reliable reports” that at least 49 women and 68 children among them, resulting in more than 500 people being killed in the crackdown. CNN cannot independently verify the number of people killed or arrested because Iran does not give accurate data.
Yasin is one of many artists whose legal name, Saman Sedi, was arrested in October 2022 and charged in connection with the movement.
He was first sentenced to death after being charged with the Islamic Republic’s crime of “successful war against God” by pulling out a gun during an anti-government protest, firing three bullets into the air and “exploiting and conspiring crimes against national security,” according to Iran’s judicial press. Yasin denies the fee.
Both Amnesty International and the UN’s independent international fact-finding mission on Iran say 10 men have been executed in connection with the riots caused by Amini’s death.
Yasin was one of dozens of protesters who appeared in a rights group called a false trial based on forced confessions extracted under torture.
Iran’s Supreme Court later overturned Yasin’s death sentence on the appeal, and his sentence was ultimately set at five years. In the summer of 2023, the artist was able to release audio messages from prisons shared by Kurdish rights groups. There, he claimed that he was abused by the authorities who first tried to elicit a confession.
Yasin’s audio message from prison
Now, when he recovered in Germany, he was able to explain his ordeal in much greater detail, and testified earlier this month before the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Psychologically, I’m completely crushed, but I’m learning to deal with it slowly,” the 29-year-old artist told CNN in a music studio in Berlin. He was visibly worried while he tried to break into the smile when he arrived.
“Physically, the torture I endured changed me a lot. It still has a lasting effect. I developed a lot of trauma after prison,” he said. The words “Nothing can stop me” are tattooed in English on one of his wrists.
CNN has contacted the Iranian government’s permanent mission to the United Nations for comments on allegations of torture and abuse of Yasin in detention. The mission has granted the request but has not commented yet.
Yasin’s music lyrics foreshadowed the torture he said he had been given to him
Yasin has long written what he calls “protest music” about Iran’s social injustice and difficulties.
In his song “Haji,” written and released a few months before his arrest, he sang:
“I’m tall and proud. And yet they banned my voice. They forbidden my happiness. They hanged me upside down like a sacrificial animal.”
These lyrics were to foreshadow the torture he says was given to him by Iranian authorities after his arrest.
Yasin told CNN that he had been subjected to “the most severe torture” during his first three months at custody.
“They inserted a pen into my left nostril and then hit it with force from underneath. I passed away from the pain. When I woke up, I was covered in blood,” he said.
The rapper interrupted his conversation with CNN multiple times when he recalled his experience behind the bar. He wears a nasal dilator to help him deal with the difficulty of breathing, which he says is the result of the abuse he suffered. His nose appears to be damaged.
I heard from other prisoners that they call it a morgue.
Saman Yashin
Then there is a cold underground room on the grounds of Evin Prison, and Yasin tells him that the interrogator “does not even exist on the map.” He believes it is in a building belonging to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry.
“I heard from other prisoners that the temperatures are so low that they call it a morgue,” he said. “It’s cold.”
“They were winding me up, hanging for an hour or two. Then they’d let me down for a couple of hours before hanging me again,” Yasin told CNN. “After a while I reached a state where I felt like I was hanging upside down, half woken up, half asleep, and in and out of consciousness. They did this for three days.”
Another abusive technique, Yasin, says he endured. Among them was abandoned on stairs, beaten, insulted, false claims that his brother was in custody, and forced psychiatric assessments. Yasin says he was forced and ultimately confessed under compulsiveness that he was the man in the video released in state media, and fired a gun during the protest the night he was arrested. He said that neither point was true and that his death sentence was partially reduced later.
His testimony is consistent with the results of a two-year investigation into the 2022 crackdown by the UN’s fact-finding mission. The Iranian government said it had “consistently rebutted the torture allegations,” but did not show whether the allegations were investigated or why they were rejected. The UN report also found that suspicious crimes were committed “to promote state policy.”
Bold escape from Iran and the cost of freedom
In late October 2024, Yasin was released in the medical phala two years later in prison. About a month later, he had undergone nose surgery and was recovering at home when the phone rang unexpectedly. Authorities had ordered him to return to prison five months earlier than expected.
But he didn’t go back. “I thought to myself, I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” the rapper said. “First of all, if I leave this country, my family wouldn’t spare me any more out of pain.
That same night, Yasin flees Iran and, with the help of smugglers who ultimately abandoned him, heads the mountains to northern Iraq, he says. In the footage shared with CNN, he can be seen in the misty mountains as the wind blows. His nose is a bandage.
“When I got to the top, the pressure was too high. My nose started bleeding and I passed away,” he said. “By a miracle I made it into Iraq.” From there, with the help of NGOs and German politicians, he was able to travel to Germany.
Now he finds himself starting from scratch in Berlin with a special humanitarian visa, a struggling artist who dreams of making it in America. Loneliness and far from family are at a cost, but he is trying to work with the cost of freedom.
“In the early days, the atmosphere was horrible and the oppression aimed at silence people was intense, but there was still a scent of freedom in the air,” he said.
“After prison, I feel like I have a great responsibility towards people. I have far greater expectations for myself. Being their voice… that means everything to me.”