Iranian authorities have, without prior warning, transferred Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi to a prison in the north of the country as concern grows over her health, her husband said on Saturday.
Mohammadi, who won the peace prize in 2023 in recognition for more than two decades of campaigning, was arrested on December 12 in the eastern city of Mashhad after speaking out against the clerical authorities at a funeral ceremony, AFP reported.
She spent time on hunger strike earlier this month and had been hospitalized before being returned to prison.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said this week it was "deeply appalled" by reports detailing "physical abuse and ongoing life-threatening mistreatment" of Mohammadi both during her arrest and in detention.
Since her arrest, Mohammadi had been held in Mashhad at the detention facility of the intelligence ministry and had only been allowed one phonecall with a brother inside Iran and another to her Iranian lawyer.
But she has now been transferred to prison in the city of Zanjan in the north of the country, said her husband Taghi Rahmani, who is based in Paris.
"This action was carried out without informing her family or her lawyer," he said on X, adding it was "intended to exile and displace Narges".
On December 7, she was handed a further six years in prison on charges of harming national security and was also given a one-and-a-half-year prison sentence for propaganda against Iran's Islamic system.
On February 2 she began a hunger strike to protest the conditions of her imprisonment and the inability to make phone calls to lawyers and family but then ended the action after a week.
Her foundation has described her physical condition as "deeply alarming", saying she was transferred to hospital in Mashhad but then returned to prison "before completing her treatment".
Mohammadi was arrested before protests erupted nationwide later in December. The movement peaked in January, with authorities launching a crackdown that activists say has left thousands dead.
Over the past quarter-century, Mohammadi, 53, who was born in Zanjan, has been repeatedly tried and jailed for her campaigning against Iran's use of capital punishment and the mandatory dress code for women.
