AFP: Iran’s hardline judiciary has said it will uphold jail terms handed out to former pro-reform MPs who sat in the last parliament, press reports said Wednesday. The decision affects Mohsen Armin, Fatemeh Hagheghatjou, Mohsen Mirdamadi, Hossein Loghmanian and Mohammad Dadfar, all of whom are on the left of the embattled reform movement, local papers said. AFP
TEHRAN – Iran’s hardline judiciary has said it will uphold jail terms handed out to former pro-reform MPs who sat in the last parliament, press reports said Wednesday.
The decision affects Mohsen Armin, Fatemeh Hagheghatjou, Mohsen Mirdamadi, Hossein Loghmanian and Mohammad Dadfar, all of whom are on the left of the embattled reform movement, local papers said.
“The verdicts are definitive and must be upheld … I think they will be carried out soon,” newspapers quoted a judiciary spokesman as saying.
Armin, a prominent leftist, was sentenced to six months in prison for insulting a rival conservative MP. He had not turned up for his trial, saying at the time he was still an MP and therefore had immunity.
While also a sitting deputy, Haghighatjou was sentenced to 17 months for “insulting the judiciary and spreading lies”, and Loghmanian was given 10 months on similar charges.
Dadfar was given a seven-month sentence and a fine of two million rials (2,200 dollars) in 2002 on charges of spreading lies and insulting state officials.
Mirdamadi, the former outspoken head of the parliament’s foreign affairs commission, was handed a six-moth jail term.
Iran’s hardline-controlled political oversight body, the Guardians Council, barred most reformists from standing in February’s elections after a stringent vetting procedure that Mirdamadi likened to a “coup d’etat”.
The elections were easily won by a mix of hardliners and conservatives, in a major blow to the reformists and their increasingly isolated figurehead, President Mohammad Khatami.
