NEW YORK, NY.- He was a renowned poet. A documentary filmmaker. A prisoner. Baktash Abtin was serving a six-year prison sentence in Iran, on national security and propaganda charges, when he died Saturday of COVID-19 complications.

Abtin, who was about 47 years old, had contracted COVID once before in prison and was hospitalized, but then he was returned to the feared Evin prison. He was infected again and fell ill last month, was hospitalized again, and was placed in an induced coma in early January as his health deteriorated.

Human rights organizations, which have said that Abtin was imprisoned for nothing more than speaking out, announced his death and blamed Iran’s government. They accused prison authorities of denying him a medical leave despite his vulnerable condition and of delaying his medical care once he got sick.

“COVID is a natural killer, but Abtin’s death was aided and abetted by the Iranian government every step of the way,” the rights group PEN America, which advocates for writers and free expression, wrote on Twitter.

Iran’s prisons directorate denied in a statement that it had delayed Abtin’s medical care. It said Abtin was treated at the prison’s clinic for a sinus infection and was transported to a government hospital when he showed symptoms of COVID. From there, his family transferred him to a private hospital, where he died after 35 days, the statement said.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Abtin’s death was “emblematic of the dire situation Iranian authorities have created for imprisoned critics of the government.”

Many Iranians on social media criticized the government for jailing a poet who posed no violent threat to anyone. They slammed the government’s claims that Abtin’s words and deeds posed a national security threat.

Iranians have a long history of revering poets and celebrating them as national icons. The tombs of medieval poets Hafez and Saadi, for example, are treated like religious shrines where pilgrims gather daily to pay respects.

The Iranian Writers Association, where Abtin was a board member, said in a statement that “Baktash Abtin is alive, because the spirit of freedom-seeking and the fight against tyranny and injustice is alive.”

A photo taken last year and shared widely on social media summed up his saga. It showed him shackled at the ankles while lying on a hospital bed in a blue striped prison uniform, reading a book.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.