GVF — After seventy days of hunger strike, Iranian blogger, publisher and physician Mahdi Khazali has been released from prison, opposition website Kaleme reported in the early hours of Monday 19 March.

The dissident blogger was violently arrested on 9 January, during which his arm broken. He was subsequently taken to Iran’s notorious Evin prison. Soon after incarceration, Khazali began a hunger strike to protest his illegal detention.

While on strike, Khazali’s health steadily deteriorated and he suffered from stomach bleeding as well as heart complications, after which he was transferred to Tehran’s Taleghani hospital. There, Intelligence Ministry agents kidnapped the ailing Khazali from the hospital bed in the middle of the night and took him to Ghamare Banihashm, a hospital affiliated with the ministry.

Mahdi Khazali spent the first 25 days of his detention in solitary confinement and was then transferred to ward 350. He also spent his last fifteen days of imprisonment in solitude.

According to Kaleme, the activist had lost more than thirty kilos of weight after the seventy-day strike. As of late, he had also started using a walking stick.

In one of his letters from Evin prison, Khazali described many of the treatments by Iranian prison wardens and interrogators as contrary to the Islamic law. “Religious and moral codes are never observed,” he writes, maintaining that torturers showed no respect for the prisoners’ Islamic beliefs.

The Khazalis are a familiar name in Iran. Mahdi, best known for the anti-government views he regularly expressed on his weblog, has been imprisoned a number of times in the past two and a half years. His most recent arrest came in July 2011 when he was held in Evin for 27 days.

His father, Ayatollah Abolghasem Khazali, is an influential cleric and member of the Assembly of Experts, the body with the authority to dismiss or appoint the leader. In strike contrast to his son’s critical views, Ayatollah Khazali is seen as a staunch supporter of Iran’s ruling elite, especially the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He has openly distanced himself from his son’s positions on a number of occasions.

On Sunday and just days ahead of the Iranian New Year, it was reported that a number of political prisoners held at Babol’s Mati Kola prison were also released from detention. Pro-opposition singer Arya Aramnejad and Parvin Mokhtare (mother of imprisoned human rights activist Kouhyar Koudarzi) were among those set free on Sunday.