The attorney of imprisoned student Ali Younesi says the authorities want to keep him and another jailed student, Amir Hossein Moradi in the high security ward of the Evin prison.

Mostafa Nili said in an interview on Tuesday that these two award winning students, who are only 21 years old, have been held in harsh conditions of the notorious 209 section of the prison for over 600 days.

He added that despite repeated demands to transfer them to other wards, the prosecutors want to keep them there until a final verdict is issued.

Section 209 of Evin Prison, reportedly the most dreadful ward of the detention facility, is one of three prison sections that are controlled by Iran’s intelligence ministry.

Nili also talked about a video of forced confessions by the two students that was published by the Fars news agency, saying that it was recorded under duress and was not even included in their files. “The question is how the agency even acquired such a document that we, as the lawyers of the case, hadn’t seen them”, he asked.

Younesi, who was the winner of the gold medal in the International Astronomy Olympiad in 2018 in China, was arrested in April 2020 along with Moradi, another award-winning physics student of the Sharif University. They are charged with “corruption on earth”, which is punishable by death in Iran.