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Iran Focus
 London,
Mar. 18 – A prominent dissident journalist has been released from prison in
Iran after serving a six-year term since 2000 for writing a book in which he
exposed the role of a number of senior officials of the clerical regime in
the murder of dissidents throughout the country.
Akbar Ganji’s
release was confirmed by his lawyer. Ganji went on
hunger strike for a brief period last year to gain an earlier release date.
The official state news agency quoted the Deputy Prosecutor General in Tehran as saying that Ganji’s sentence officially ends on March 30 and that he
was being given prison leave because of the Persian New Year, which falls on
March 21.
Top American and European officials and a number of international human
rights organisations had called on Tehran to release him.
In a series of articles beginning in 1998, Ganji
revealed that the macabre killing of a number of dissidents in Iran had been
carried out by the country’s dreaded secret police, the Ministry of
Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
Among the extrajudicial killings that Ganji
revealed to have been carried out by MOIS agents was the murder of two
Anglican bishops and a pastor in Iran in 1994 and 1995. The
government initially blamed the opposition People’s Mojahedin
(or Mojahedin-e Khalq, MeK) for the killings and set up a show trial of three
alleged MeK members, but Ganji
later revealed that the Christian priests were killed by MOIS agents in a bid
to tarnish the image of the Islamic regime’s opponents.
Ganji also unveiled “insider information” showing
that the secret police was behind the bombing of the most revered Shiite
shrine in Iran
in 1994, in another disinformation exercise designed to discredit the
dissident MeK.
He was also convicted of harming “national security” for taking part in a
conference in Berlin in April 2000 on the
political situation in Iran.
Ganji was an officer in the Revolutionary Guards
and later spent a brief spell in Turkey
as Iran’s
cultural attaché, before turning into an investigative journalist and
dissident.
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