TEHRAN, 17 May 2004 — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sees no case for executing leading dissident Hashem Aghajari, a judiciary official quoted a religious decree from Khamenei as saying yesterday.
A provincial court last week upheld the death sentence for blasphemy against history lecturer Aghajari who urged Muslims not to follow senior clerics “like monkeys”.
Under Iran’s constitution, it would be unthinkable for a court to defy the ruling of the supreme leader, making it unlikely that Aghajari will be executed. No one in Khamenei’s office was immediately available for comment.
“According to a religious decree from Ali Khamenei, the comments made by Aghajari...are not an example of blasphemy and do not justify the death sentence,” Abdolreza Izadpanah, the deputy judiciary chief for crime prevention, told the official IRNA news agency.
Aghajari’s case was sent to the Supreme Court last week for a final ruling although no appeal was filed, newspapers said. Aghajari’s refusal to appeal against the verdict meant he effectively challenged the hard-line judiciary to hang him.
Izadpanah said the judiciary had received no order from Khamenei to review the case, contradicting media reports. Aghajari, who lost a leg in the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, had questioned the clerical rule in Iran.
In a rare direct criticism this month, pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami denounced Aghajari’s “unjust death sentence” and said the judge who issued it was “inexperienced”.
Meanwhile, several hundred students threw rocks at the British Embassy in Tehran and tried to storm the building in a protest yesterday over the US-led occupation of Iraq, but were turned back by riot police, an AFP correspondent said.
“Death to America, death to Britain and death to Israel,” chanted the protesters.
