At Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, a horrific tale from Roya Tolouee, a leading Iranian pro-democracy and women’s rights advocate, who was brutally beaten and raped, and threatened with having her children burned to death in front of her, by a man who said he believed in only two things—Islam and the rule of the mullahs: Dissident tells of assaults and threats against children. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

For the first six nights, she was taken to a basement where interrogators demanded that she admit to organising the protests, and also that she identify co-conspirators on a list of names they put to her.

“When I wouldn’t do what they wanted, they slapped me. But after the sixth night, the routine changed. I was left alone in a small dark room with two men. One was the assistant prosecutor and called himself Amiri. The other had a filthy mouth and said terrible things. They started slapping me again. For the rest of the night they did to me what no woman should ever experience. Amiri said, ‘I’m going to hang you, but before I hang you, I will make an example of you so that no woman will dare to open her mouth here again’.” He then sexually assaulted her.

When she asked Amiri how he could act like that, he told her that only Islam and clerical rule were important to him. The attack left her badly bruised and bleeding internally, but she refused to sign the papers they put before her. To her assailants’ fury, she demanded to see a lawyer and cited international treaties on human rights.

The following night they did not sexually molest her again as she was still bleeding - and hence “unclean”. Instead, they told her that they would kill her children by setting them on fire before her eyes.

Finally, she admits, she cracked. “I threw myself at Amiri’s feet and begged him not to harm my children. I said I’d do anything they wanted. Whatever they wanted, I would sign.” She admitted to conspiring against the regime by giving interviews to the foreign media and leading the protests, but said that she did not implicate others.