NOPO — Iran's special forces riot police — seized control of Evin Prison on Day 7, displacing regular staff who abandoned their posts. Food distribution stopped in the women's ward and Ward 7. Authorities ordered financial prisoners transferred to Fashafuyeh prison in greater Tehran, and political prisoners and foreign nationals moved to Qom Prison, roughly 150 kilometres south. A missile struck near the outer perimeter and destroyed a section of the prison wall. Prisoners are resisting the forced transfers, according to the human rights monitor Iran HRM.
Evin has been the Islamic Republic's primary political detention facility since 1979. Among those currently held: Narges Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 while imprisoned for campaigning against the death penalty; Zeynab Jalalian, a Kurdish activist whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2012 after sustained international pressure; and British nationals whose status now becomes an urgent consular question — the UK withdrew embassy staff from Bahrain on Thursday but has not publicly addressed the safety of its citizens inside a facility under bombardment.
The transfer pattern sorts prisoners by political sensitivity, not security risk. Financial inmates go to Fashafuyeh, a lower-security facility. Political detainees and foreign nationals — the categories most consequential if killed in a strike or freed through a breached wall — go to Qom. The Assembly of Experts already relocated its emergency session to Qom, treating the city as beyond the primary strike zone. Israel struck the Assembly's Qom headquarters earlier that same week, which makes that assumption less certain. The transfers resemble wartime repositioning of assets more than prison management.
Forced transfers under active bombardment, with food already cut and a wall already breached, place detainees at immediate physical risk with no ability to refuse or protect themselves. During the Iran-Iraq War's final phase in 1988, the Islamic Republic executed thousands of political prisoners — an episode documented exhaustively by Amnesty International and raised by Iranian human rights organisations as context for their current demand for international monitoring of Evin's population. The NOPO deployment, the guard exodus, the wall breach, and the halted food supply describe a facility that has stopped functioning as a prison and become a problem the authorities are racing to disperse before it compounds.
