Free Republic

An Iranian parliamentary panel said Sunday that Tehran’s prosecutor, an ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was responsible for the beating deaths of three imprisoned protesters last summer, state news agencies reported. The panel’s investigative report said the prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, who has since been promoted, was responsible for the violence against protesters in the notorious Kahrizak detention center, where at least three young men, including the son of a former Revolutionary Guards commander, were killed. The allegation was a rare criticism of a senior official involved in the government’s crackdown on the protest movement that erupted in June over disputed...

The hangman of Tehran may soon get a taste of his own medicine. Over the last decade, Saeed Mortazavi has jailed dozens of journalists and reformist politicians and was instrumental in squashing the opposition Green Movement after last year's presidential election. He was openly associated with some of the regime's worst post-election abuses. But in August he was stripped of his judicial immunity, and a Tehran prosecutor named him as the lead person accused in the abuses at Kahrizak prison, a notorious detention facility where at least three people were killed and a handful of others claimed they were raped.