On the morning of Sunday, July 28, 2024, intelligence officers from Raygan County raided the Sunni religious school in Raygan, Kerman Province. Several teenage students without identification documents were violently arrested and taken to an unknown location. The school’s principal, Hafiz Sadiq Shahiki, 33, was also summoned and arrested. There has been no information about his whereabouts for 24 hours.
As of the time of this report, the exact identities and number of detained students, aged between 13 and 17 and fewer than ten, are still unknown.
At approximately 6 a.m., security and military forces raided the Sunni Quran Memorization Branch in Raygan, arresting several undocumented teenage students with violence and insults, and closing the school. Following the arrests and the school’s closure, the school’s principal and instructor, Hafiz Sadiq Shahiki, was summoned to the Rigan intelligence office and has not contacted his family since.
Local sources have indicated that a few months ago, after Eid al-Fitr, the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office of Bam County had summoned and threatened Hafiz Sadiq Shahiki, warning that he would be arrested if he continued teaching migrant students.
It is worth noting that Hafiz Sadiq Shahiki has been summoned and threatened by security agencies multiple times before. These pressures increased after the demolition of the Sunni prayer hall on June 2, 2024, in Bam and his protests against this illegal action by military forces.
