A reformist former government spokesman detained after Iran’s disputed election in June has been sentenced to six years in jail, the semi-official Fars news agency reported yesterday.
It said Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, who backed opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi in the vote, was sentenced by a court on charges including acting against national security, propaganda against the Islamic system and possessing classified documents.
The report of his jail sentence coincides with mounting tension in Iran after the death of a leading dissident ayatollah and opposition reports of clashes between the cleric’s supporters and security forces in Isfahan on Wednesday.
Ramezanzadeh, who held his post during the 1997 to 2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami, was among scores of senior pro-reform figures and activists detained after the poll on accusations of fomenting post-election unrest.
“Based on the court’s decision Ramezanzadeh was given a six-year obligatory jail sentence,” Fars quoted a Revolutionary court statement as saying, without saying when the verdict was issued.
Last month, Iranian media said reformist former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi was also sentenced to six years in jail. He was later released on bail of US$700,000 pending appeal.
Abtahi, one of dozens of leading moderates detained after the disputed election on charges of trying to topple the clerical establishment by orchestrating protests, was the most senior reformer to be jailed after the presidential election.
Thousands of people were arrested after the poll, which the opposition says was rigged in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favor. Most of them have since been freed, but more than 80 have received jail sentences of up to 15 years in connection with protests after the vote, the judiciary says.
The authorities reject the opposition’s vote rigging charges and have portrayed the huge opposition protests that erupted after the election as foreign-backed.
Despite arrests and crackdowns, opposition supporters have continued to stage sporadic rallies.
Tension increased again after Saturday’s death of a dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri at the age of 87.
His death occurred in the tense run-up to Ashura on Sunday, a politically important Shiite religious commemoration that offers the opposition another opportunity to show its strength.
Meanwhile, the US accused Iran on Wednesday of increasingly behaving like a “police state” after clashes in Isfahan on Wednesday.
Hundreds of security force members surrounded the Seyed mosque, where a service for Montazeri was to be held and prevented mourners from entering, sparking the violence, opposition Web sites said.
The mourners were shouting slogans in support of Iran’s opposition Green Movement and police fired tear gas to disperse them, Web site Rahesabz.net said.
More than 50 protesters were arrested and security forces beat women and children, reports said.
“Iran is increasingly showing itself to be a police state,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said. “It is using all of its levers, all of its various security elements to try to stamp out clearly the aspirations of the Iranian people for a different relationship with their government.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS