By Matt Christie
IT ALL started on the facet of a street on the outskirts of Rasht, the most populous metropolis of northern Iran. Iman Zahmatkesh, his sister, and his pal had been strolling in direction of town centre when a police van pulled up alongside them.
Zahmatkesh, then 20, was identified to the authorities. He was an activist for ladies’s rights on the college the place he studied and consequently misplaced his place in his remaining yr. His opinions and presence on the college had been now not tolerated.
“They call them morality police, they dress normally like us, [but] they are police,” Zahmatkesh explains to Boxing News. The now 29-year-old chuckles intermittently as he retells a hellish story. It’s presumed he’s attempting to maintain the ghosts at bay.
“My sister went pale, and I said to her, ‘don’t worry, I will speak to them, we’re doing nothing wrong, you are okay.’ But she was [showing] a tiny bit of her hair and you’re not allowed to do that in a Muslim country.”
He tried to purpose with one of them whereas the others went in direction of his sister. It was then that the screaming began.
“They were pepper-spraying her, dragging her along the floor by her hair. She was bleeding. Then, basically, I switched. ‘Don’t touch her.’ I told my sister to leave, I didn’t want her to get in trouble. My friend, poor boy, he didn’t do anything wrong, he wasn’t involved.”
Punches had been thrown as crowds gathered. More police had been referred to as. ‘Go!’ Iman shouted at his sister. Amid the pandemonium, his sister made her escape and, glad she was secure, Zahmatkesh and his pal did the identical. They darted down an alleyway, away from the roads and out into the darkness of a close-by forest. Iman threw his telephone away, aware that it could possibly be tracked. “I told my friend to do the same. But [unbeknownst to me] he just hid it in his socks.”
They walked for miles, deep into the countryside. “We were just outside and stayed outside for one day. The second day, we were getting hungry. We were so hungry, we wanted to go to the supermarket to get food. We walked down this little road and, suddenly, I saw car, car, car.”
Those automobiles contained the police. They had tracked his pal’s telephone. The boys ran till weapons fired; the bullets had been too near danger triggers being pulled once more. “I stopped, I knew they would kill us and [for them] there would be no problem. I tried to say sorry, they tasered my head, tasered my knees. It felt like my whole body was bursting. Then they tried to put me in the boot of the car.”
By now blindfolded, he was taken to what he describes as a ‘torture area’ the place he was tied to the ceiling and overwhelmed with batons. “You don’t know if you’re going to stay alive or not, people were getting killed. But all I’m thinking about is my family, how worried they are, because I had just disappeared.”
Every day, whereas dangling from the ceiling, his physique could be below siege. Every evening, the aid from being untied was solely momentary; he was then stripped bare and bundled right into a room embellished by illuminous industrial lighting designed to make sleep unimaginable. The incessant torture was crude, but it surely had the specified impact; Iman felt like he was dropping his thoughts. “Then, in the morning they would come, handcuff you, hang you again, beat you again, hang things from my testicles. They would tie you to a board, and this sounds silly, but they would drop tiny bits of water onto your forehead. Your body is so light that after a little while it feels like someone is hitting your head with a hammer. I’ve never experienced such a thing.”
Two weeks glided by earlier than they had been paraded round their metropolis in open prime autos for example to the locals. “They made out we were gangsters, that we were violent, nobody knew we were trying to help my sister.”
He was taken to a particular jail the place murderers had been welcomed, and violence couldn’t escape. Fellow inmates had been instructed that in the event that they killed Iman, favours could be granted. The machetes had been duly sharpened.
Today, Iman lifts up his t-shirt to indicate me the scars that stay from these jail battles. One sprawls throughout his again, the consequence of a knife wound that went rotten, others are dotted throughout his physique. He smiles once more, relieved.
Eventually, his household raised the bail required to get him out earlier than his trial. Within hours of his launch, nonetheless, his home was raided by police, and it grew to become clear that the nightmare had barely begun. They wished to make an instance out of him. Best case state of affairs, the top would come rapidly, and he could be executed in public. The worst was a lifetime of torture in jail.
Iman wouldn’t settle for both. On the recommendation of his household, he fled. It could be 9 years earlier than he noticed them once more. Once in Tehran, he stayed within the basement of his aunt’s home for a couple of weeks, staying out of sight, speaking solely to her. She gave him cash so if he made it to the Turkey-Iran border he may pay a smuggler to get him out of the nation. It was the thick of winter and the mountains separating the 2 international locations had been wearing dense snow. And so started the escape that might finish two years later in Bognor Regis on the south coast of England.
The hike up the mountain took 9 hours. With his legs paralysed by cramp, Iman – whereas avoiding the glare of a safety patrol – may solely use his arms to get down on the opposite facet. He was out of Iran.
Greece was the subsequent goal. One week earlier than Iman stepped onto a packed boat on the Turkish coast, 60 asylum seekers perished in The Aegean. The water was so chilly they didn’t stand an opportunity.
Iman survived however there was panic when a ship approached them. He knew that if the boat contained Turkish authorities, he could be taken again to Turkey and then instantly deported to Iran. “It was a Greek boat,” Zahmatkesh chuckles, conscious he was due some good luck eventually. “They took us straight to Mytilene [on the Greek Island of Lesbos].”
Iman spent a number of months in Greece. While there, he met a British lady, Lisa, who was within the nation serving to refugees. “I could barely speak English then but I could speak it better than others,” Iman explains, “so I would translate. I could tell them that certain groups needed clothes, some needed shoes.” Lisa promised Iman that, if he made it to England, he may dwell along with her household.
Homeless however by no means hopeless, Zahmatkesh tried to make his option to Macedonia. The police had been on his path once more, nonetheless. Dogs gave chase so Iman jumped into close by water. It was January and the one garments he had had been on his again. He put them on a tree within the hope they might dry by the morning. “It was four or five in the morning, I was freezing, so I reached for my clothes, and they were just ice. They were frozen.”
But on he went to Germany and then France. It had been one yr since he climbed the mountain in Iran. “Then I had to cling on to the underneath of a lorry that was driving to a ship [heading for the UK],” he explains. How lengthy was he clinging on for? “Maybe two hours. That was lucky, if they had pulled up the lever that controls where the wheels are, depending on the load, I would have been squished. People did get squished, but luckily, I did not. I was fine.”
Once in Britain he phoned Lisa. Today, Lisa is his mum. Her husband, Andy, is Iman’s dad and their three youngsters are his brothers and sisters. They have been a household for seven principally blissful years. Any unhappiness has been a consequence of being an asylum seeker, attempting to show he deserves to remain right here within the UK, show that he’d be at risk if he was made to return. “It has been hard at times because I was not allowed to work, I had to rely on my mum and dad for money. I am a fully grown man, I am proud. I know they would give me anything, but I wanted to pay for things myself. I owe them everything.”
On Friday evening (March 22), with refugee standing eventually granted, Zahmatkesh – the runner up at 92kgs within the 2022 NACs – made his skilled boxing debut inside Bethnal Green’s York Hall. A winner by first-round knockout, it proved to be a stroll within the park.
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