CAT/C/53/D/473/2011 The facts as submitted by the complainant 2.1 Hussein Khademi and his family are of Kurdish ethnicity. Mr. Khademi was born in Divandareh, Kurdistan Province, Islamic Republic of Iran and moved to Marivan in 1969, where he joined the “Peshmerga,” an armed force of the Democratic Party of (Iranian) Kurdistan (KDPI) at the age of 18 or 20 years. As an active peshmerga for three years, he participated in both combat operations and attacks against military structures. He also assisted and accompanied his father, a KDPI group leader. After leaving the Peshmerga, he went to worked in Tehran and Bandar Abbas, before returning to Marivan in 1986. He married his wife in Marivan, where he worked as a butcher and owned a small store. 2.2 In 1991, the Mr. Khademi was summoned by the ETELAAT, the Iranian intelligence services police. Upon his arrival at the ETELAAT station, he was blindfolded and left in a fenced courtyard for three days. On the fourth day he attempted to escape, but was caught and beaten by two prison guards. Bones in his right hand were broken. The ETELAAT accused him of spying for the KDPI in exile, carrying out dissident activities and threatening national security. He was kept in the ETELAAT prison in Marivan for 18 months, eight of which were spent in solitary confinement. He was subjected to questioning and beatings on an almost daily basis, as well as floggings and electric shocks. Mr. Khademi’s family only learned of his whereabouts eight months into his detention. 2.3 In the summer of 1993, Mr. Khademi was transferred to Sanandaj and formally prosecuted and sentenced to death. He successfully appealed the verdict, however, and as a result was instead sentenced to 15 years in exile in the city of Yazd. He was obliged to report to the ETELAAT on a daily basis during this time. The complainant’s father was also arrested, held in prison for three years and subsequently sentenced to 15 years in exile in the city of Kashan. 2.4 In March 2001, Mr. Khademi returned to Marivan, while on leave, to visit his mother and sisters on the occasion of Nowruz.1 In the city centre, opposition supporters were demonstrating against the regime. That same evening, Mr. Khademi received a phone call from his brother warning him that the ETELAAT had come to arrest him on the grounds that he had been filmed in the proximity of the demonstrators earlier that day. Members of the ETELAAT searched his house in Yazd several times looking for incriminating material; they arrested his eldest son, Ramyar, who was detained at the police station in Yazd for two days before being released upon payment by Mr. Khademi’s friend, Ashkezari. Mr. Khademi fled to Mehriz to a friend’s house, where his family joined him a few days later and together they left for Saqiz. On 2 April 2001, Mr. Khademi and his eldest son, Ramyar, crossed illegally into Iraq, where the remaining family members joined them one month later. Together, they fled to Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where they were recognized as refugees by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and issued residency permits by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). However, fearing for his life after two assassination attempts in Erbil by the Marivan ETELAAT section, Mr. Khademi and his family left Iraq for Greece via Turkey in 2003. After receiving an expulsion order four years later, the family left Greece and travelled to Switzerland, where they filed an asylum application on 27 August 2007 and 3 September 2007. The complainants initially did not reveal the fact that they had been in Greece for fear of being expelled there under the Dublin regulations. Furthermore, on 22 September 2008, Radio Kurdistan broadcasted an obituary for the Mr. Khademi’s deceased father, in which both the complainant and his father’s activities with the Peshmerga were discussed. 1 Persian New Year. 3