Arrest of Individual Accused of 'Rape' of Afghan Teen in Kashan

Following reports about the suicide of a 12-year-old Afghan boy in Kashan after he was allegedly 'raped', the Chief Justice of Isfahan Province announced that the suspect in this case was arrested on Friday morning, April 5. Ahmad Khosravi Vafa stated in an interview with the Mizan news agency on Saturday that the arrested individual has confessed to 'kidnapping'. According to Khosravi Vafa, an autopsy order has been issued to 'determine the exact' cause of death of the Afghan teenager, and a comprehensive investigation by a special investigator has begun to verify the claims made regarding this case. Last week, some social media users and websites reported that an Afghan teenager named Hamid Rezaei committed suicide after being kidnapped by a man and 'raped'. According to Hamid Rezaei's family, an Iranian man on February 28, 2019, kidnapped this Afghan teenager while he was playing with friends, after 'threatening him with a knife', and took him to the desert. Abdolshokor Rezaei, the father of the teenager, stated that his son told his friends before committing suicide that he had been 'raped' and 'would commit suicide to preserve his family's honor'. He also mentioned that the court and law enforcement had 'not taken any action' in the past month despite filing a complaint against the individual who kidnapped their child. According to Mr. Rezaei, after the news of the teenager's suicide was published and a new complaint was filed, judicial authorities announced that they would arrest this individual. Following the reports about Hamid Rezaei's suicide, a delegation from the Afghan Embassy in Tehran met with his family. In recent years, several cases of rape and murder of Afghan children residing in Iran have made headlines. For instance, last year, Neda Alizadeh, a seven-year-old Afghan girl in Mashhad, was murdered, and judicial authorities in Mashhad identified a 41-year-old neighbor of this family, who is a father of three, as her killer. The murder of this young girl sparked outrage in Mashhad and revived the case of the murder of Setayesh Qureshi, another six-year-old Afghan girl who was sexually assaulted and killed by a teenage neighbor in Varamin in April 2016. In 2017, the death sentence of Setayesh Qureshi's killer, who was 16 at the time of the crime, was carried out, leading to protests from the UN Human Rights Commission.