Ward 209 of Evin Prison — the Intelligence Ministry's own detention facility within the larger complex — has been evacuated. Prisoners were moved to an undisclosed location. The evacuation is distinct from the broader seizure of Evin by NOPO riot police days earlier, in which regular guards abandoned their posts, food distribution stopped, and a missile struck the outer perimeter wall.
The distinction between the two events matters. The NOPO takeover was institutional chaos — riot police seizing a prison from its regular staff during wartime, forcing mass transfers of financial prisoners to Fashafuyeh and political detainees to Qom. The Ward 209 evacuation is the Intelligence Ministry extracting its own detainees from a facility it no longer fully controls. Since the 1980s, Ward 209 has operated as a facility within a facility: run by MOIS rather than the prison administration, with its own interrogation staff, its own intake process, and a specific category of detainee — dual nationals, journalists, accused spies, and political cases the ministry considers too sensitive for the general population.
Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi and Kurdish activist Zeynab Jalalian are among those held in the broader Evin complex. Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her campaign against the death penalty and for women's rights in Iran, has been imprisoned at Evin intermittently since 2015. Jalalian, sentenced to life in 2008, has been denied adequate medical treatment according to Amnesty International and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Whether either was among the Ward 209 evacuees is unknown. Transfer to an unidentified facility would place them beyond the minimal monitoring that sustained international pressure has provided.
The destination and purpose of the evacuation are unverifiable. The security explanation — moving prisoners from a facility with a breached wall already under missile fire — is plausible. But Iran's intelligence services have moved sensitive prisoners to undisclosed locations before consequential moments. During the 2009 post-election crisis, detainees were transferred from Evin to the Kahrizak detention facility, where at least three were killed — deaths that became a political crisis when a military physician leaked his findings and was himself later found dead. Ward 209's evacuees are now held at a location that has not been named, under conditions no outside body can monitor.
