The mother of Behnam Mahjoubi was on Tuesday [February 16] allowed to visit the imprisoned Gonabadi Dervish, who has been in hospital in a comatose state for three days at Tehran’s Loghman Hospital.

“[His] mother finally could visit him,” Ebrahim Allah-Bakhshi, a friend and fellow Gonabadi Dervish tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “Only 30 percent of his respiratory system is working and he has no other signs of life in him.” Earlier on Tuesday, Allah-Bakhshi had tweeted that Mahjoubi, who suffers from serious panic disorder, had passed away.

On Monday evening an informed source told Iran International TV that prison authorities had hospitalized Mahjoubi, who is serving a two-year prison term, after a third panic attack when he repeatedly vomited and lost his power of speech. The source said the prison authorities had not hospitalized Mahjoubi when two earlier attacks endangered his life.

According to claims on social media, fellow prisoners staged a protest before Mahjoubi was finally taken to hospital, and Sajjad Shokri, a labor activist, was beaten by guards. Shokri, it was claimed, later self-harmed in desperation.

On Tuesday the Tehran prison department issued a statement that Mahjoubi had been transferred to hospital due to taking too much medication. The informed source who spoke to Iran International TV said the prison clinic had administered too much sleeping medication to him instead of sending him to hospital for treatment for panic disorder.

In an open letter published in a twitter thread in September, Mahjoubi’s wife, Saleheh Hosseini, said the prison physician had threatened to send him to a mental hospital if he did not abide by his orders. She alleged that her husband’s regular medicine for panic disorder, provided by the family, had been replaced with sleeping pills. “They gave him 14 to 17 sleeping pills every night until half of his body was paralyzed after a seizure on Saturday evening as a result of being denied his own medication,” she wrote.

In late December a group of prisoners in Evin prison issued a statement reporting a deterioration in Mahjoubi’s health after he went on hunger strike in protest at prison conditions. Mahjoubi was arrested in April 2018 after protests in February of the same year by Gonabadi Dervishes when hundreds gathered around the Tehran home of their leader Noor Ali Tabandeh. Dervishes of the Gonabadi order are among religious groups seen as potential security threats in Iran.

In November, Mahjoubi sent an audio file from prison alleging he had suffered brutal torture in a psychiatric hospital and that he had been forced into signing confessions that Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran admitted as evidence to convict him of “colluding to commit crimes against national security.” Mahjoubi began his sentence on June 20, 2020.

Chief Justice Ebrahim Raeesi on Monday said international organizations could visit Iranian prisons as long as “they allow us to visit any prisoner we want in their country.”