Canada ping.
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Posted on 05/05/2006 12:31:33 AM PDT by familyop
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Prominent Iranian philosopher and writer Ramin Jahanbegloo has been arrested on suspicion of espionage, newspapers said on Thursday.
Iran's judiciary on Wednesday confirmed the arrest, without specifying the charges brought against Jahanbegloo, who also holds Canadian citizenship.
The first high-profile intellectual arrested since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June, Jahanbegloo is being held at Tehran's notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran's jailed political dissidents are kept.
Several newspapers carried reports linking the top writer's arrest to "espionage."
"Jahanbegloo has been arrested ... on charges of spying," an unnamed source was quoted by the official Iran newspaper as saying. The source did not elaborate.
Canada -- whose relations with Iran were badly damaged over the case of a photographer who died in custody in 2003 after being arrested in Tehran -- said little about the arrest.
"We made contact with Iranian officials in Tehran ... for reasons of personal safety and our concern for this individual, we do not feel that public commentary at this time would be helpful. We do not want to endanger his life," Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told reporters on Thursday.
Canadian legislator and former Harvard academic Michael Ignatieff, who said Jahanbegloo was a close friend, dismissed as "fanciful" the idea that the academic had been spying.
Rights groups frequently lambaste Iran for detaining pro-reform writers, journalists and intellectuals without due legal process.
"The arbitrary arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo shows the perilous state of academic freedom and free speech in Iran today," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
"This prominent scholar should be celebrated for his academic achievements, not interrogated in one of Iran's most infamous prisons," Stork said.
Thursday's edition of Canada's Ottawa Citizen newspaper linked Jahanbegloo's detention to an article he wrote for Spanish daily El Pais in January, in which he challenged Ahmadinejad's remarks that the Holocaust was a myth.
But Iran's culture minister denied any relation between Jahanbegloo's articles and his detention.
"In the Islamic Republic, no one is arrested for expressing their views," Culture Minister Mohammad Hossein Saffar-Harandi told a news conference on Thursday.
Jahanbegloo, educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and Harvard University, has written and edited books in English, French and Persian on subjects such as Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi and liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Head of the Department for Contemporary Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran, he has also lectured on the prospects for democracy in Iran and on whether the Islamic state can engage with the West.
I don't understand why intelligent people go to these places without expecting this to happen.
They seem to either think they are too big for it to happen to them or just in complete denial.
I don't know why on earth anyone in their right mind would want to visit Iran in the current political climate. Perhaps Ignatieff could go to Iran to negotiate his friends release!
Canada ping.
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A good question. He was probably visiting friends or relatives or gathering material for his writings. Very dangerous work in this regime.
GMMAC, don't think so. The way things are going, our dollar will be at a premium soon and our tax rate will be lower. Isn't conservative capitalism great? And, isn't Canada the luckiest country in the world?
He will wish he was in the loo before the Jahanbegs are thru with him!
Ivory tower folks should stay home!
This is one incredibly dangerous regime.
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