STOCKHOLM, Sweden, March 31 (UPI) -- An Iranian doctor, who has lived in Sweden, says Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi was savagely beaten and raped before she died in Iranian custody in 2003.
Shahram Azam, an emergency-room doctor who examined Kazemi before she died, said the woman was also tortured, the Globe and Mail reported in a dispatch from Stockholm.
The doctor, who recently received political asylum in Canada, had been a physician on the staff of the Iranian Defense Ministry.
He said he examined Kazemi, a 54-year-old Iranian-born dual citizen, at a Tehran hospital on June 27, 2003, four days after she was arrested while photographing a demonstration outside Tehran's Evin prison.
His account of Kazemi's condition in the days before her death, the first by a medical eye witness, confirms she was tortured far more brutally than even critics of Iran's hard-line theocratic regime had believed, the newspaper said.
"Her entire body carried strange marks of violence," Azam said.
Azam was scheduled Thursday to give an account of his examination at a news conference in Ottawa.
Canada has tried to pressure the Iranian regime, without much success, into reopening the case.
