Leading Iranian activist jailed

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian court on Tuesday sentenced a leading student activist to five years in prison for various charges including acting against state security, the dissident student said.

Prominent student leader Abdollah Momeni said one of the charges related to organising student protests in 2002-2003 against a death sentence issued against reformist academic Hashem Aghajari for blasphemy.

The death sentence for Aghajari, who angered the religious establishment by saying that Muslims should not blindly follow the teachings of clerics, was later overturned and he was freed.

Momeni said he would appeal his sentence and free pending his appeal which he must file within 20 days.

"I did what an active student should do. It is students' duty to defend citizen's rights," Momeni told Reuters by telephone.

Scores of student activists have been arrested in pro-democracy protests in the past six years, but only some have been kept in jail for more than a few months.

The judiciary said in November it would ask Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to pardon 18 jailed pro-reform students arrested during previous protests.

Iranian students clash with hardliners
18 November, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2489421.stm

Thousands of Iranian students demanding political reform have clashed with hardline militia groups in the capital, Tehran.
Witnesses said about 5,000 students gathered at the Sharif Technical University campus to protest against the death sentence passed down to pro-reform academic Hashem Aghajari earlier this month.

Fighting between the two sides is said to have broken out towards the end of a speech by a student, when several hundred hardline militants entered a hall in the university where the students were and began punching and kicking them.
The group later dispersed, but some of the students were reported to have sustained light injuries.

Review

Outside the university, police maintained a heavy presence, reportedly restricting passage into and out of the campus.
The protest was held despite an order at the weekend by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, that Mr Aghajari's sentence should be reviewed.
Some students said that the intervention did not go far enough in satisfying their demands.

"Our problem is not only the revision of the death sentence on Hashem Aghajari, but freedom of speech and freedom in general," student leader Abdollah Momeni told French news agency AFP.
Fighting also broke out on Sunday between the two groups at the university.
BBC correspondents say Ayatollah Khamenei's decision to order a review of Mr Aghajari's sentence indicates how seriously the authorities view the protests.

War veteran

Monday's demonstrations are the latest in a series in support of Aghajari, who lectures in history.
He was found guilty of renouncing Islam on 7 November after saying in a speech that each generation should re-interpret aspects of Islam rather than blindly follow religious leaders.

Last Friday, hardliners held counter-protests where about 1,000 people called for his execution, many of them dubbing him "Iran's Salman Rushdie".
Reformists see the prosecution as the latest in a long line of moves against liberal figures by the hardline judiciary.

The BBC's Jim Muir reports that it was unthinkable in Iran that the death sentence would actually be carried out.
A war veteran who lost a leg in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, Hashem Aghajari belongs to a left-wing reformist political group, the Islamic Revolutionary Mujahidin Organisation.

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