Faraj SarkouhiIran 
Faraj Sarkouhi was a signatory to the "1994 Declaration of 134 Iranian Writers," a document calling for an end to all censorship of literary endeavor in Iran. In November 1996, he disappeared from Tehran Airport where he had been waiting to board a plane to Berlin. The official Iranian press insisted that Sarkouhi had flown to Germany. On December 20, Sarkouhi reappeared at a press conference in Tehran, where he was forced to claim that he had been visiting Germany but could not substantiate his claims of having traveled. German officials strongly denied that Sarkouhi had ever entered Germany. In January 1997, he wrote to his wife, revealing that he had never left Iran. Instead, he had been subjected to intensive interrogation which included beatings and death threats. He was arrested again and held in pretrial detention for approximately nine months. In September 1997, he was sentenced to one year in prison for slandering the Islamic Republic. Sarkouhi was freed from prison in 1998. He left Iran for Germany in May 1998.
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