TEHRAN, 16 May 2004 — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has told the head of the justice department to re-examine “as quickly as possible” the file on dissident intellectual Hashem Aghajari, condemned to death for blasphemy, the student news agency ISNA said yesterday.
Giving no source for its report, the news agency spoke of the “supreme leader’s serious unhappiness about the delay seen in the case.” Aghajari, a history professor at Tehran University and a disabled war veteran, was convicted of blasphemy by a judge in Hamadan for saying that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” religious leaders.
The November 2002 verdict sparked protests in Iran and abroad, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded it be reviewed. In January 2003, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial but the same judge in Hamadan confirmed his previous sentence.
Iran’s top judicial authorities are thought to be anxious to avoid a repetition of the protests that followed the original death sentence, prompting a call to order from Khamenei. Aghajari is unlikely to be executed although a provincial court has upheld the sentence, his lawyer said yesterday. “The death sentence will definitely be quashed by the Supreme Court, if legal principles are taken into account,” Aghajari’s lawyer Saleh Nikbakht told Reuters.
Iranian newspapers reported Zekrollah Ahmadi, judiciary chief in the western province of Hamadan where the sentence was reviewed, as saying Aghajari’s case had been sent to the Supreme Court although no appeal had been lodged.
ISNA reported that Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, was angered by the decision to re-issue the death penalty and called on the judiciary to review the verdict.
Aghajari himself has refused to appeal against the sentence, effectively challenging the hard-line judiciary to hang him. Shiite Muslims have to follow the decrees of senior clerics. By debating this point Aghajari questioned the entire system of clerical rule.
Students staged mass protests when Aghajari’s sentence was first handed down in Nov. 2002, prompting Khamenei to make his first call for a review of the case.
A provincial judge in Hamadan, carrying out the review, insisted on the death sentence in a closed-door session. Some 600 people gathered on Tuesday at Tehran University to criticize the judiciary’s treatment of Aghajari, who lost a leg in the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.
His death sentence has been widely denounced in Iran, even by some Islamic conservatives who said it was a gift to reformists and Iran’s Western enemies. In a rare direct criticism this month, pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami condemned Aghajari’s “unjust death sentence” and said the judge who issued it was “inexperienced”.
Meanwhile, the US Department of State on Friday warned US citizens that travel to Iran could be dangerous. The State Department renewed earlier warnings that citizens carefully weigh the risks of travel to Iran and check the department’s security updates before going.
“Due to ongoing tensions in the region, particularly along the border with Iraq, US citizens may be at higher risk of harassment or kidnapping,” the State Department said in a statement in Washington.
