Jailed for success: But Kamiar and Arash—who got a three and a six year sentence, respectively—had not been breaking Iranian law, nor were they doing anything that could be considered dissent. They were AIDS doctors. They worked with Iran’s most marginalised populations—drug addicts, sex workers, prisoners—and invented new ways of helping those people that came to be adopted across the country as official policy. And they spoke about what Iran was doing in high-profile international meetings, bringing goodwill and credit to a government in desperate need of both.
These meetings were their undoing. The brothers were too public, too closely aligned with western scientists. “They were mixing it with Americans a bit too much,” said Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St Andrews. “The government was trying to send a signal to people—don’t do things with the west on your own initiative.”