Zahra "Ziba" Kazemi-Ahmadabadi (; 1948 – 11 July 2003) was an Iranian-Canadian freelance photojournalist. She gained notoriety for her arrest in Iran and the circumstances in which she was held by Iranian authorities, in whose custody she was killed. Kazemi's autopsy report revealed that she had been raped and tortured by Iranian officials while she was at Evin Prison, located within the capital city of Tehran.

Although Iranian authorities insist that her death was accidental and that she died of a stroke while being interrogated, Shahram Azam, a former military staff physician who used his purported knowledge of Kazemi's case to seek asylum in Canada in 2004, has stated that he examined Kazemi's body and observed that she showed obvious signs of torture, including a skull fracture, nasal fracture, signs of rape, and severe abdominal bruising.

Her death was the first time that an Iranian death in government custody attracted major international attention. Because of her dual citizenship and the circumstances of her death, she has since become an international cause célèbre. In November 2003, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression honoured Kazemi with the Tara Singh Hayer Memorial Award in recognition of her courage in defending the right to freedom of expression.

Life and death

Kazemi was born in Shiraz, Iran, and moved to France in 1974 to study literature and cinema at the University of Paris. With her son, Stephan Hachemi, she immigrated to Canada in 1993 and settled in Montreal, Quebec, where she later gained Canadian citizenship and became a dual citizen. She worked in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean and then more frequently in various Middle Eastern countries, including the Palestinian territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She visited the latter two countries both before and during the American occupation. Immediately before her traveling to Iran, Kazemi revisited Iraq, documenting the U.S. occupation. Recurrent themes in her work were the documentation of poverty, destitution, forced exile and oppression, and also the strength of women in these situations.

Arrest

thumb|[[Evin Prison|Evin House of Detention, where Kazemi was arrested and held]]

Traveling back to her birth country using her Iranian passport, Kazemi was allowed into Iran to take photographs of the possible demonstrations that were expected to take place in Tehran in July 2003. The demonstrations took place and were effectively crushed after the sixth day by a massive deployment of security forces and paramilitary vigilantes, or "plainclothesmen." Following the clampdown, an estimated 4000 students "had gone missing" and were thought to have been arrested for protesting and taken to Evin prison, Tehran's political prisoner detention facility. As was customary after such events, family members of the missing gathered outside of Evin prison in the north of Tehran in hopes of learning what had happened to their children. On 23 June 2003, Kazemi drove to the prison to take pictures of these family members, possessing a government-issued press card that she thought made it permissible for her to work around Tehran, including at Evin.

According to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and former judge who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and later became the main representative of Kazemi's family at the trial over Kazemi's death, a prison staff member saw Kazemi taking photographs and demanded that she give him her camera, as photography is prohibited in front of the prison.

<blockquote>Worried that officials might harass the families whose photos she had already taken, she flashed her press card and exposed the film to the light. The guard angrily yelled at her, ‘I didn't ask you to expose your film, I told you to give me your camera’ ‘You can have the camera,’ she retorted, ‘but the film belongs to me.’ She was detained and interrogated over the next three days by police officers, prosecutors, and intelligence officials.</blockquote>

The Evin prison staff, whom the Kazemi family's lawyers consider a party in the beatings that led to Kazemi's death, say that she had been in a sensitive area, photographing parts of the prison. Several days after her arrest, hardline newspapers ran stories "calling her a spy who had entered the country undercover as a journalist."

  • 20 July 2003 – IRNA reports that Kazemi died from a fractured skull caused by "a physical attack."
  • 21 July 2003 – Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi is appointed by Iran to head an independent investigative group to look into Kazemi's death. This appointment is immediately fiercely attacked by pro-reformist Iranian MPs, as Mortazavi had himself been accused of failing to prevent Kazemi's death, and was widely believed to be behind a recent wave of arrests of writers and journalists. Given this controversy, the investigation appeared unlikely to mollify Canada, which was growing increasingly impatient with Iran's unwillingness to "clearly demonstrate that officials are not allowed to act with impunity" (Foreign Minister Bill Graham, news conference).
  • 23 July 2003 – Kazemi's body is buried in her hometown of Shiraz in Iran, supposedly according to the wishes of her mother (Ezzat Kazemi) and relatives in Iran, but contrary to the wishes of her son (Stephan Hachemi, who resides in Montreal), and Canadian officials. Canada recalls its ambassador to Iran, and discusses the possibility of sanctions against Iran. (Her mother later said that she had been put under pressure to approve of an Iranian burial.)
  • 25 July 2003 – The Iranian Foreign Minister echoes the words of Canadian officials almost word for word while addressing Ottawa, in reference to the death of an 18-year-old Iranian citizen (Keyvan Tabesh) in Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada, by plainclothes police officers. The shooting occurred around the same time as Ms. Kazemi's death. He demands that Canadian officials "clearly demonstrate that officials in Canada are not allowed to act with impunity, ... [and] The Islamic republic will seek through diplomatic channels clear and convincing explanations of this crime." A Port Moody police investigation later finds that the use of force in the incident was consistent with police guidelines.
  • 26 July 2003 – Iran announces that it has arrested five members of its security services in connection with the investigation, and gives no further details.
  • 30 July 2003 – Iran's vice-president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi says that Kazemi was probably murdered by government agents.
  • 25 August 2003 – Two Iranian intelligence agents who had interrogated Kazemi are charged with complicity in her death. The Teheran prosecutor's office releases a statement reading in part, "The charges leveled against the interrogators, who are said to be members of the Intelligence Ministry, are announced as complicity in semi-intentional murder."
  • 26 July 2004 – Kazemi's mother told the court that her daughter had been tortured, and said she was pressured into burying her daughter at her birthplace in southern Iran under duress to deny Canada the opportunity to carry out its own autopsy.
  • 31 March 2005 – Dr. Shahram Azam, the Iranian doctor who examined Kazemi just prior to her death, said he was shocked by the extent of her injuries, and felt she had been tortured. He reported injuries consistent with torture, such as flogging wounds on the back and missing fingernails. A female nurse told him of "brutal" genital injuries. Azam did not give her a vaginal examination himself as it is considered inappropriate in Iran for a male physician to examine a woman in this manner. Azam fled the country, seeking political asylum in Canada to tell his story.

Aftermath

In June 2005, an exhibition at the municipal Côte-Saint-Luc Library in Montreal of photos taken by Zahra Kazemi during her travels in Middle East was shut down following accusations by Jewish patrons of alleged "pro-Palestinian bias" for including five of her photographs on display that depicted scenes inside Palestinian refugee camps. Gallery officials proceeded to remove the five photographs while leaving the rest of the exhibition. In response, Kazemi's son, Stephen Hachemi, called the removal of the Palestinian photographs "a violation of my mother's spirit" and demanded that the library either display the entire collection or nothing at all. Eventually, the library closed the entire exhibition.

Côte Saint-Luc Mayor Robert Libman told CBC news "It's a very complicated conflict, and to create an impression where the Palestinian cause is being martyred by oppression by the Israeli government, we don't consider that to be a fair portrait, in the future, such politically charged work won't be displayed at the library". Critics of the decision to take down the exhibition denounced it as "censorship". Naomi Klein and Aaron Maté wrote that it is "part of a disturbing pattern to silence opposition to the expansionist Israeli occupation of the Occupied Territories". According to the caption that accompanied the photo exhibition, she "illustrated the daily life of Palestinians and the problems they faced as they sought to preserve their land and their identity" in the face of "exodus, poverty, humiliation, suffering, and the ravages of war".