The World Presents: Lethal Dissent

Mohammad Shabani's suicide note is analyzed by a handwriting expert and Fariba Nawa gets the results. She follows the ripple effects of the new information, and Mohammad's best friend tries to make sense of what it means.

Fariba Nawa is threatened. She steers her reporting to focus on impunity. The investigation into Iran's hunt for dissidents goes to the United Nations, inside a Turkish parliamentary hearing, and to the US State Department to find out if anyone will intervene.

The Sağlam family's kidnapping operation is caught in a police dragnet. The ensuing police investigation reveals an entire network of conspirators behind the Sağlams. When one conspirator is arrested and interrogated, he confesses. Fariba Nawa uses the confession to tell the story of Iran's behind-the-scenes involvement.

Rezaie gets into the car with the Sağlams. But he already knew he was being tricked. His suspicions had begun long before he climbed into the car, back at the kebab restaurant when the Sağlams introduced him to an American woman. Fariba Nawa tries to untangle the story of the American woman, and finds out how Rezaie foiled the kidnapping plot against him.

New information is coming in. Fariba Nawa and her team are running it down.

There's a convincing explanation for Mohammad Shabani's death, but the evidence is incomplete. While Fariba Nawa waits for a crucial piece of evidence to be analyzed, she tries to find out how far Iran will go to silence dissidents. A Turkish court case exposes an Iranian kidnapping ring and offers an answer. Fariba finds a source to guide her through some of the inner workings of the secret operation.

In the city where the dissident Mohammad Shabani died, Fariba Nawa finds evidence that points towards his cause of death.

The death of poet Mohammad Shabani, an Iranian dissident living in Turkey, catches his friends, family, and supporters by surprise. Fariba finds one of Mohammad Shabani's confidantes and learns new details about his life in exile before he died.

When two close friends who work for the Iranian government follow their conscience, it puts them at odds with the regime. Now one of them is dead. To figure out what might have happened, reporter Fariba Nawa goes back to the beginning.

Reporter Fariba Nawa introduces her investigation into Iranian plots against exiles in Turkey. She tells the story of Iran's history of violence against its citizens at home, and how that violence has grown to cross international borders today. The fate of a dissident in France becomes a blueprint for the questions she seeks to answer.

Lethal Dissent is a 9-part series about the price and peril that Iranian dissidents face for speaking out against their government, and the secret operatives who seek to silence them.It all begins when two friends flee Iran to escape the regime’s crackdown on dissent. But when they arrive in Turkey, one of them dies under unusual circumstances. Fariba Nawa, a reporter in Istanbul, works to unravel the mystery of what happened. In the process, she enters Turkey’s underworld of kidnappers-for-hire and shady government officials, and takes the listener inside an Iranian operation to snatch exiles who stand up to the regime. The stakes: the right to say what you truly believe, and potentially, your life…A story from The World and On Spec Podcast.With support from the Pulitzer Center and Zamaneh Media…First episode drops May 31st wherever you get your podcasts.