Iran court sentences students for insulting Islam
Deirdre Jurand at 2:35 PM ET
[JURIST] An Iranian court sentenced three university students to prison terms ranging from two to three years for insulting Islam and Islamic clerics, the students' lawyer said Tuesday. Officials arrested the students [AFP report], Majid Tavakoli, Ahmed Ghassaban and Ehsan Mansouri, in May along with five other students on charges of endangering national security and insulting Islam. Lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah said the trial opened September 22 and closed Tuesday with sentences of three years in prison for Tavakoli, two-and-one-half years for Ghassaban and two years for Mansouri. Dadkhah, a human rights lawyer who is part of the team of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi [Nobel profile; JURIST news archive] team, said he is unsure whether the court intended suspended terms or prison time. The students all attend Amirkabir University of Technology [official website] in Tehran and are leaders of Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat (the Office for the Consolidation of Unity) [HRW profile], the largest-known Iranian student reform group. Group officials and the three students maintain [AFP report] that the newsletter that contained the "insults" was made by more conservative people to frame the group. Dadkhah said the students plan to appeal the judgments.Iran has recently made a number of high-profile arrests of scholars accused of endangering national security, including Iranian-American Dr. Haleh Esfandiari [JURIST news archive]. Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the US-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was arrested in May, detained for over 100 days, but was released on bail and left Iran [JURIST reports] in September. Charges against her still stand. AP has more.
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Can you provide the links for the original source of the news?
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=86008
Iran jails three students for insulting Islam
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
TEHRAN: Iran on Tuesday handed down jail sentences of at least two years each to three students imprisoned since May on charges of insulting Islam, the Mehr news agency reported.
The three students from Tehran's Amir Kabir University - Ehsan Mansouri, Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghassaban - were among eight arrested on suspicion of publishing anti-Islamic images in four student reformist newspapers.
"The verdicts for the accused Amir Kabir students were issued today," their lawyer Mohammad Ali Dadkhah said, according to the Mehr news agency.
"Ehsan Mansouri has been sentenced to two years in prison, Majid Tavakoli to three years and Ahmad Ghassaban to two-and-a-half years," he said.
Dadkhah,who is a member of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi's group of human rights defenders, said that it was not clear whether the sentences issued by Tehran's revolutionary court meant prison or suspended terms.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
The other five arrested have since been released, but this trio has been detained since May with the authorities saying they have not been freed because of the gravity of the charges against them.
Dadkhah vowed to appeal against the verdicts.
In August, Mansouri's mother publicly accused the authorities of torturing the young men at Tehran's Evin prison in an effort to obtain confessions. The judiciary insists that torture is not used in Iran.
Amir Kabir University has long been a hotbed of student activism, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the target of heckling in a stormy address to the university last year. - AFP
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