Iran Bans Reformist Newspaper, Jails Publisher

A hard-line court banned Iran’s leading pro-reform newspaper Saturday and sentenced its publisher to jail, marking a new setback for supporters of liberal change in the Islamic republic.

State television reported that the court had banned the outspoken liberal daily Neshat and sentenced publisher Latif Safari to a total of 2 1/2 years in jail.

The court had suspended the paper earlier this month for articles opposing capital punishment in Islam and calling on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneto stay out of factional politics.

Safari was sentenced to jail for one year for “insulting basic tenets of the Koran and sacred values,” one year for “inciting students and people to revolt and strike” in July’s unrest in Tehran, three months for allegedly slandering the conservative police chief and three months on the charge of insulting members of parliament.

It was not immediately clear whether the sentences would run consecutively.

Freedom of expression has emerged as the central battleground between supporters and opponents of President Mohammad Khatami.

Saturday’s decision came amid a chorus of condemnation by conservative clerics against the authors of a satirical student play that they viewed as blasphemous.

Conservative newspapers printed a statement Saturday in which Ayatollah Hossein Mazaheri declared that the authors of the play, which invoked one of the holiest figures in Shiite Islam in its lampooning of campus conservatives, should die for insulting Islam.

On Friday, student leaders said two classmates at Amir Kabir University of Technology had been arrested for publishing the play in a campus journal.