Iranian Photojournalist’s Whereabouts Unknown More Than A Week After Arrest

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has urged the Iranian authorities to immediately release Nooshin Jafari, a photojournalist and culture reporter who was detained 10 days ago on unspecified charges.

"It is outrageous for Iran to hold a journalist in an unknown location, for no reason, and with no contact with her family, for more than a week," CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said in a statement on August 12.

Jafari was detained outside her Tehran home on August 3 and taken to an unknown location, the New York-based media freedom watchdog said, citing news reports.

Authorities also searched Jafari's home that day and confiscated dozens of items, including her phone, memory drives, and cameras, according to a photograph of an Iranian judiciary document that circulated on social media.

No charges have been announced against the journalist.

Social media accounts affiliated with apparent hard-liners spread accusations that Jafari ran an "anti-state" Twitter account, CPJ said.

The group quoted an unidentified person close to Jafari as saying that the journalist "didn’t have any private or public account on social media, including on Twitter."

Jafari was previously arrested in 2009, when she was working at the reformist Etemad daily, according to CPJ.

Eight journalists were found to be imprisoned in Iran in direct relation to their work at the time of CPJ's annual prison census on December 1, 2018.

The country is ranked 170th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' 2019 World Press Freedom Index.