Two weeks ago, plainclothes officers stopped three women as they were about to board an airplane at Tehran airport, loaded them into cars, and took them away without explanation.
They became the latest people to disappear into a place that all educated Iranians know and fear, a place known as Section 209. These women were writers with relatively moderate views, on their way to attend a journalism seminar in India.
They had government permission to attend, their passports had been stamped and none of them had ever had problems with the law.
Mansoureh Shojai, Sadigheh Taghinia and Farnaz Seifi were lucky: They were released on bail after a day of frightening interrogation, and charged with the nebulous crime of "acting against national security." Countless others remained in cells around them, held for months without charge.
Nobody knows how many people are currently held in Section 209, a tile-walled wing of Evin prison, a sprawling complex hidden behind a barbed-wire entrance on a street in northern Tehran.
But former inmates say the numbers have increased dramatically in recent months, as Iranian officials have cracked down on journalists, activists and academics, accusing dozens of people of spying, collaborating with Westerners and undermining the Iranian revolution. Few get charged with any crime, but huge numbers are locked away, and sometimes tortured, in Section 209.
The wing is forever associated, in the minds of both Iranians and Canadians, with Zahra Kazemi, the Montreal photographer who was arrested while taking pictures outside the prison in 2003. Inside, she was tortured, brutally abused and then beaten to death.
Her death made many Iranians aware of the prison's brutal and shadowy nature, and has recently provoked a surprising movement to have Section 209 shut down, even as it seems to have reached its highest population levels since the 1980s.
Section 209, which has been used since the 1960s, is today run by Iran's various security services, and it houses prisoners who have somehow fallen afoul of some branch of Iran's government or its religious authorities. To anyone but the Iranian government, they would be known as political prisoners, though a great number of them have not been charged with any crime, even though some have been held for months.
Iranians who have recently been in Evin prison say there are dozens of students, journalists, Internet bloggers, newspaper editors, human-rights activists and scholars held there, sometimes in cruel conditions, including a form of solitary confinement known as the "white torture" (the lights of the windowless, empty cell are constantly left on, for months at a time). Beatings are not uncommon. And the name of Ms. Kazemi is routinely evoked. Omid Memarian, a young journalist who was held in Section 209 starting in 2005, for operating an Internet blog (he was released after refusing to confess to espionage) said his interrogators invoked her name. "While interrogating me and beating me up, the interrogator said, 'I don't want you to be the next Zahra Kazemi.' They knew they'd gone too far, and they didn't want that kind of attention again," he said.
Ms. Kazemi's case has had a profound effect in Iran. On one hand, it has destroyed relations with Canada: After trials against the prison officials who led her torture came to an indecisive end in 2005, their progress apparently blocked by the Iranian government, relations became extremely tense. In November, Iranian parliamentarians accused the Canadian embassy in Tehran of being a "den of spies" and threatened to close it down.
But it has also galvanized many Iranians, including members of the country's legislature, against the practices taking place in Section 209. There is currently a petition circulating in Tehran that has collected 300 signatures from intellectuals and public figures, calling for it to be closed. It has reportedly been signed by highly placed officials in the Iranian government.
