TEHRAN: Iranian dissident Mehdi Khazali, who was serving a six-year prison sentence for acts against national security and spreading propaganda against the regime, has been freed on health grounds.
The official IRNA news agency quoted Khazali’s lawyer as saying that the 48-year-old inmate was hospitalised after going on hunger strike, and that the authorities had decided he was too ill to return to jail.
“A representative of the prosecutor and a doctor went to my client’s bedside and have judged that the continuation of imprisonment would be dangerous for his health,” said lawyer Mostafa Tork-Hamedani.
“He is free,” he added.
Khazali was arrested on January 9, 2013 for the third time in two years and released on bail in June the same year. But he was arrested again last month and sent to jail to serve his sentence.
A doctor by profession and a veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Khazali is the son of Ayatollah Abolghassem Khazali, an important religious figure known for taking ultra-conservative positions.
Ayatollah Khazali has disowned the views of his son, including his criticism of Iran’s human rights situation. The younger Khazali regularly criticised former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a personal blog and on the BBC’s Persian service and Voice of America radio, which are banned in Iran.
AFP
TEHRAN: A revolutionary court in Iran has jailed eight young people for anti-regime posts on Facebook.
The eight were jailed for “acting against national security, anti-regime propaganda and insulting religious values and Iranian leaders”, a media reportss said, without elaborating. Those convicted came from Tehran, Yazd, Shiraz, Abadan and Kerman, and were each imprisoned for between 11 and 21 years. They can appeal against the sentences.
AFP
