Iran: official

According to Global Voices Online , February 3, four Iranian bloggers and journalists were sentenced to up 3 years in prison and flogging.
Human Rights Watch reports that Omid Memarian, Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, Shahram Rafizadeh, and Javad Gholamtamimi were arrested September 2004 and that they were tortured during interrogation to coerce them to confessions.
In a meeting with the head of judiciary, ayatollah Shahroudi said that the case would be investigated.
In 2005 a judiciary spokesman said that an official investigation confirmed that their confessions had been coerced.
The deputy director of the Middle East division at Human Rights Watch said that these sentences are shocking because the judiciary admitted that the evidence had been obtained by coercion.
The four journalists were released on bail in late 2004. Memarian, Mirebrahimi, and Rafizadeh subsequently left Iran and are living abroad. Gholamtamimi resides in Iran.


The First Secretary of the US Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, Marco Kampf, is summoned by the Foreign Ministry in Switzerland over sex charges.
He had an indecent sexual relation with an Iranian woman in his diplomatic-plated car on a parkingspace in Tehran.
The Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman called the scandal a 'regretful incident'.
The Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger said that both the Swiss diplomat and the Iranian woman have left Iran after they were released by the Iranian police.


Fars Newsagency reported that after an address from ayatollah Shahroudi, the Supreme Leader decreed to pardon 1,167 political, military and civil prisoners on occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Republic.

Hassan Ghashghavi, a foreign ministry spokesman for Iran, said that the fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie, spoken out in 1989 by ayatollah Khomeini, is still valid.
The fatwa was spoken out for his book "The Satanic Verses".

In Iran there are childoffenders, still on death row.

Children are being hanged to death.
A child will be hanged to death.
Poster amnesty.nl