Prior to his death, Saber was in and out of prison a number of times on various charges.

"For about 150 days after the arrest I was not interrogated by the examining magistrate and no indictment was presented to me."

Reza Hoda Saber was a journalist, economic scholar and nationalist-religious activist, who served several terms in prison. He was first arrested on January 28th, 2000. Security forces searched his home and confiscated his books, research notes and even his family photo album. After a month and a half in detention he was released on bail.

On April 12th 2003, Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court sentenced Saber to ten years of imprisonment and banned him from social activities for ten years. He appealed the verdict and was released pending the appeals court decision. But on June 15th 2003, Saber and two other nationalist-religious activists, Reza Alijani and Taghi Rahmani, were arrested without warrant and access to a lawyer. They spent three months in solitary confinement, accused of provoking unrest at a student demonstration protesting a proposed plan to privatize universities earlier that month.

“I was surrounded by a task force of five security agents near my home and arrested in front of bewildered passersby,” Saber wrote in a letter to the president and judiciary chief. “Two days later they asked me to sign a charge sheet, which specified that I had been present at a university demonstration and had been arrested there. For about 150 days after the arrest I was not interrogated by the examining magistrate and no indictment was presented to me,” the letter read.

On May 1st 2004, the appeals court sentenced him to five and a half years in prison. But Saber and a group of other political prisoners were released after two years, prior to the 2005 presidential elections.

In August 2006, an appeals court sentenced Saber and Rahmani to eight months in jail for "helping to found an illegal organization" though the organization – an NGO helping underprivileged youth – had been registered with the Ministry of Interior.

After the disputed presidential elections of 2009, Saber was arrested once again and taken to an unknown location. But the detention didn’t last long and was more closely akin to a warning. On July 23rd 2010, however, Saber was taken into custody to serve his prison sentence.

On June 2nd 2011, Saber and another political prisoner, Amir Khosrow Dalirsani, went on a hunger strike to protest the conditions that had caused the death of Haleh Sahabi, an inmate and democracy activist, who was given a furlough to attend her father’s funeral but died after she was beaten by the Basiji militia. The following day Saber started suffering from chest pains. Although he was screaming, the prison staff disregarded him. Saber was eventually taken to hospital where on June 10th 2011, he died of cardiac arrest.

After his death, 64 political prisoners in the communal Ward 350 of Evin Prison signed a letter, which blamed security agents for causing Saber’s death by beating him.

“According to law, prison authorities are responsible for the life and health of each prisoner,” Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi told International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. “Unfortunately, this responsibility was not carried out in the case of Hoda Saber. According to the testimony of several of his cellmates who witnessed the event, while sick, Hoda went to the prison infirmary. Instead of being treated, he was beaten, despite having a heart condition, to the point where he got angry. The prison staff returned him from the infirmary to his cell without any treatment, while he was shouting ‘I will file a complaint against you.’ After a short while, his condition deteriorated to the point where he lost his balance and fell down. He was moved to the hospital on a stretcher with some delay, but it was too late.”

Ebadi added that “the deaths of Iranian political prisoners is systematic, and that the Iranian government has caused the deaths of many political prisoners over the years.”

Many people attended Reza Hoda Saber’s funeral even though security forces were present in force. The Iranian judiciary has yet to hold the culprits of Saber’s death accountable.