The raid on the home of Abdolfattah Soltani was carried out on the orders of Tehrans Public Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi. Iran Focus
The raid on the home of Abdolfattah Soltani was carried out on the orders of Tehrans Public Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi. Mortazavi himself has been implicated in the murder and a French newspaper quoted sources in Tehran as saying that Kazemi died of blows to her head by Mortazavi.
Agents entered the premises carrying a warrant for Soltanis arrest, but they were unable to detain him as he had gone out earlier in the day.
They instructed Soltanis family to turn him in to the authorities for questioning.
Irans semi-official daily Kayhan has charged that Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Abdolfattah Soltani are fellow-conspirators in a plot to compel jailed dissident Akbar Ganji to die. Kayhan even claimed that Ebadi and Soltani were discovered and detained by security guards on the roof of the hospital where Ganji is staying. Ebadi strongly dismissed the charges as bogus.
Photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested in July 2003 for taking photographs of families of political prisoners who had gathered outside Tehrans notorious Evin Prison to obtain some information about their loved ones.
She was tortured and raped while in detention, according to a former Iranian military doctor who had examined Kazemi at a Revolutionary Guards hospital, where she was taken after losing consciousness in Evin Prison.
On Monday, during a hearing where Kazemis relatives had requested the judiciary to reopen the murder trial, Soltani pointed the finger at Mortazavi for the murder.
