PARIS: Iranian security forces “violently” arrested the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, along with eight other activists, at a memorial ceremony for a lawyer who died earlier this month.

Mohammadi, who was granted temporary leave from prison in December last year, was detained along with eight other activists at the ceremony for lawyer Khosrow Alikordi, who was found dead in his office last week, her foundation wrote on X.

Those arrested at the ceremony in the eastern city of Mashhad included Mohammadi’s fellow prominent activist Sepideh Gholian, who had previously been jailed alongside her in Tehran’s Evin prison.

Also writing on X, Mohammadi’s Paris-based husband, Taghi Rahmani, confirmed the arrests. The Hengaw rights group said the activists had been “violently detained and transferred to an undisclosed location”.

“Narges was beaten on the legs and she was held by her hair and dragged down,” one of her brothers, Hamid Mohammadi, said in Oslo where he lives.

Alikordi, 45, was a lawyer who had defended clients in sensitive cases, including people arrested in a crackdown on nationwide protests that erupted in 2022.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2025