Iran hands down jail terms over controversial German
conference
TEHRAN, Jan 13 (AFP) - Iran on Saturday handed down long jail terms
to several leading reformists over an "un-Islamic" conference
in Germany that prosecutors charged was aimed at overthrowing the clerical
regime.
The verdict will surely further strain relations with Germany, Iran's
largest trading partner, as German press reports said Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder had called off a planned visit to the Islamic republic.
Many of those convicted are close political allies of reformist President
Mohammad Khatami.
Maverick journalist Akbar Ganji, long a thorn in the side of Iran's
conservatives, was slapped with a 10-year prison sentence and a further
five-year exile from Tehran after he gets out of jail.
His lawyer, quoted by the official IRNA news agency, said Ganji got
four years for attending the conference and six years for an array of other
serious charges, including spreading propaganda against the Islamic regime.
The Berlin conference, staged in April by a foundation with links to
Germany's Greens party, centred on the future of political reforms in Iran
after reformists won a parliamentary majority in last February's elections.
The gathering, which was disrupted by the Iranian opposition in exile,
was deemed "un-Islamic" in part because a man disrobed in protest
and a woman danced with bare arms. The footage was shown on state television
here.
Ganji was also convicted of insulting Islamic Iran's founder, the late
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as well as current supreme leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei. His lawyer said he would file an appeal.
An interpreter with the German embassy in Tehran, Said Sadr, was also
given 10 years while another translator, Khalil Rostam-Khani, was handed
a nine-year sentence, a family of one of the defendants told AFP.
Meanwhile student leader Ali Afshari, political head of Iran's largest
pro-reform student group, was given a five-year sentence, his lawyer told
IRNA.
Afshari, who was already in prison over a fiery campus speech last month
challenging the authority of Khamenei, was given four years for taking
part in the conference and a year on other charges. He will also appeal.
The Tehran Times, citing a statement by his Office to Consolidate Unity
student group, said earlier Saturday that Afshari had "disappeared"
after being taken for questioning on January 3. He still faces other charges.
Sources said other defendants were handed as much as four-and-a-half
years, including dissident nationalist Ezatollah Sahabi of the banned but
tolerated secular Iran Freedom Movement.
The 75-year-old Sahabi was also arrested in December after a speech
at the same rally with Afsahri.
Six people were reportedly acquitted, the sources said, among them one
of Iran's leading female politicians, Jamileh Kadivar, wife of former culture
minister Ataollah Mohajerani.
There was no immediate word on the fate of dissident cleric Hassan Yusefi-Eshkevari,
who was being tried by a separate religious court for members of the clergy.
The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, in its edition appearing on newsstands
Monday, reports that Schroeder has called off a planned visit to Iran.
"The positive political context needed for the visit is lacking,"
the magazine quotes a source close to the chancellery as saying.
Schroeder had been invited by Khatami, whose visit to Germany last year
was seen as a watershed in Iran's efforts to improve its image on the international
stage.
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