Iranian magazine chief detained for insulting Khomeini

TEHRAN, July 29 (AFP) - Police have arrested the director of a weekly magazine for publishing "insults" about the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's official news agency IRNA said Wednesday.

Mohammad-Reza Zaehri, a conservative cleric who heads the weekly Khaneh, was detained for "offending Islam, the Shiite clergy and Imam Khomeini and for publishing photgraphs which violate public modesty," justice ministry spokesman Said Nobari said.

Zaehri is to appear before the press court on Monday, Nobari told the news agency, adding that he had not been taken into custody earlier in the investigation because he was a cleric.

Nobari said Zaehri was accused of authorising publication in his magazine of a photograph of an unveiled woman playing football. Khaneh is published by the Young Journalists' Club, an organization set up two years ago by former officials of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

The magazine's offices were the target of a firebomb attack on Sunday, officials said.

The magazine sparked outrage among radical fundamentalists earlier this month by publishing what it said were extracts of a letter from a young reader in which he said he knew nothing of Khomeini because he was only 12 at the time of the former guide's death in June 1989.

Under the new Iranian penal code based on sharia or Islamic law that was introduced in 1996, both offending Islam and insulting Khomeini or his successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, carry sentences of up to two years in jail.

Ten years after his death, Ayatollah Khomeini is still portrayed almost as a saint and infallible. Khaneh broke the taboo by publishing a letter in which an anonymous woman criticised the former supreme leader of Iran.

She wrote that Khomeini's name evoked the image of executions without trial and horrors of thousands of innocent people killed in the country's eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.

She also said that she could not follow someone who turned Iran into an international terrorist state by issuing a death Fatwa against the British author, Salman Rushdie.

Related links

* Iran News
* Complete list of Iranian online media
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