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Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran, Jul. 28 – Agents of Iran’s
public prosecutor’s office and plainclothes policemen conducted a raid on
Thursday morning on the home of a lawyer representing the family of
murdered Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi.
The raid on the home of Abdolfattah Soltani was carried out on the orders of Tehran’s 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 Soltani’s
arrest, but they were unable to detain him as he had gone out earlier in
the day.
They instructed Soltani’s family to turn him in
to the authorities for questioning.
Iran’s 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 Tehran’s 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 Kazemi’s
relatives had requested the judiciary to reopen the murder trial, Soltani pointed the finger at Mortazavi
for the murder.
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