The Story of the 'Prostitution Scandal' in the Babol City Council

A few days after it was announced that five members of the nine-member Babol City Council had been arrested, while it was believed that their charges were related to 'economic corruption', the city's Friday prayer leader revealed that the real issue was a power struggle and a moral trap set by some members against others. ILNA news agency reported that these five individuals were arrested on the evening of September 4, and although the reason for their arrest has not yet been disclosed by 'responsible authorities', it is said that they were detained due to economic violations. The local website Khazar News also reported, without providing details, that 'one of the security agencies, after monitoring the activities of some members of the Babol City Council for a long time, carried out a simultaneous arrest of five council members.' Speculation continued until Mojtaba Hassan Rouhani, the Friday prayer leader of Babol, revealed the reason for the arrest of these five council members during last week's Friday prayers. According to Mr. Rouhani, 'some outsiders, with the help of elements from within the council, used a woman to lead the council into prostitution.' The Friday prayer leader of Babol stated that the members of this city council 'did not show mercy to each other and set traps for one another, filming each other,' and then to 'erase' the films, 'one [of them] spent 370 million, another 450 million tomans, and another one spent one billion and two hundred million tomans.' Rouhani also criticized the governorate, security, intelligence, and oversight bodies for being 'observers of these scenes' and added, without going into details, that he had been advised 'not to say' for 'months', but he did not keep quiet. ISNA news agency also reported that following the revelations of the Friday prayer leader of Babol, the number of arrests in the city council and municipality increased, and even the brother of one of the council members [the brother of Marmer Firoozpour] became involved in the moral corruption case. Reports indicate that a total of eight people have been arrested in connection with the scandal in the Babol City Council. According to this report, among the five arrested council members, whose identities were revealed by the website Rouydad 24 as Rajab Malayi Reysi, Mehdi Alijanzadeh Kashi, Mehdi Tajdaran, Seyf al-Reza Shahabi, and Javad Bijani, four resigned and one has not yet resigned. Following the disclosure of this incident, the official website of the Babol City Council also removed the names of these five individuals, and only the names of four other members, namely Moghim Moghim, Faramarz Abolhasani, Mohammad Reza Shafaeiyan, and Marmer Firoozpour, are available as members of the Babol City Council on this website. However, as reports indicate, the power struggle in the Babol City Council and the moral trap set to eliminate a rival is that out of the nine members of this council, four belong to one group and five to another. After the decision of one group’s members to change the board in the upcoming elections became clear, one member of the other group, who did not want the council’s board to change, 'set a trap' for the opposing group by 'bribing' a woman outside the council. This woman, whose name was reported by Rokna and ISNA news agencies as 'Roqieh', owned a photography studio and 'with her filming skills, lured council members to a house that had been prepared in advance and filmed her sexual relations with council members using six cameras hidden at various angles.' According to these reports, this woman, who was 'on the verge of separating from her husband, became acquainted with the brother of one of the female members of the Babol City Council and, with the cooperation of him and another member of the Babol City Council, set this trap for the council members.' According to the statements of the Friday prayer leader of Babol, 'two members of the rival group fell into this woman's trap, and after that, the main perpetrator threatened these individuals with immoral CDs that had been made of them, saying that if they voted for the change of the council's board, he would release the films.' However, those two members of the rival group in the council did not 'listen to his threats, and ultimately the council's board was changed, and it was after that that the main perpetrator decided to release the CDs.' The two individuals who were threatened with the release of the CDs of their sexual relations with the photographer woman 'agreed to pay 370 million and 450 million tomans to the main perpetrator to prevent the films from being released.' ISNA reported that the main perpetrator, after 'extorting' from the two council members, intended to sell all the 'CDs he had made of the council members to someone in the municipality and asked for more than one billion tomans for it, but before that, agents from the intelligence department and security agencies arrested the suspects.' The website Vaqeel Melat also reported that the brother of Marmer Firoozpour, a member of the Babol City Council, was among those arrested, and Firoozpour stated that 'when I realized my brother was involved in this matter, I handed him over to the prosecutor's office.' He added that 'my brother's connection to this matter does not concern me. If I had a role in this matter, I would definitely be questioned as well. The crime my brother committed does not concern me.' Vaqeel Melat also reported, without mentioning the names of the Babol City Council members, that one of the resigned members of the council has been released on bail, and four other members are being held by security agencies for further investigation at least until the end of the week. According to this report, these four members are being held outside of Babol. The issue of economic violations by council members in several areas of Iran has been repeatedly raised in the media, and news of their arrests has been published regularly. These violations are so significant that Salman Samani, the spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, announced that only during the governments of Hassan Rouhani, eight city councils have been dissolved and the memberships of 283 members of councils across the country have been revoked. However, according to Mr. Samani, the incident that occurred in the Babol City Council is 'not fundamentally related to the council members' duties, and therefore these cases are under investigation in the judiciary, and necessary actions will be taken if proven and after following the legal process.' If the reports from Babol are proven, this will be the first time that a power struggle in city and village councils in Iran has led to such a significant moral scandal. The media have not mentioned the political affiliations of the members of this council, but some Hezbollah users on Twitter have taken the opportunity of the incident in Babol to write that since the elections for city and village councils are held without the oversight of the Guardian Council, widespread corruption occurs in them. One user named Elias Maleki wrote: 'The city council elections are the only elections without the oversight of the Guardian Council.... Look at their products; every day there is news of their financial or moral corruption.' Shahab also wrote: '-Do you know about the sexual corruption in the Babol City Council? -Yes, I heard. -It's the result of the Guardian Council's supervisory oversight! -Of course, the approval of the council's qualifications has nothing to do with the Guardian Council -Well, it doesn't matter; it's the same wherever the values are... -Of course, the winners of the Babol elections were reformists;)