Stop Fundamentalism – Reporters without Boarders says more Iranian journalists and webloggers have been arrested by the Iranian regime, receiving harsh and long jail sentences during recent days.
Two journalists were arrested on April 3 to serve a six-month jail term on the charges of running anti-government propaganda. Another woman journalist named, Rihaneh Tabatabai, received notification from the Iranian Revolutionary court that she has been sentenced to one year prison.
A weblogger, Mansoureh Behkish, has recently been informed that she has received a four and half years prison sentence for running anti-government propaganda. She is a member of a women’s movement called “Mothers in Mourning” which consists of mothers who have lost their children to executions and mal-treatment of Iranian regime in its prisons.
“Behkish, 54, has been campaigning for years about the arbitrary execution of political prisoners during the 1980s,” says the journalists right body. She has formed the “Mothers in Mourning” with 33 others and they were arrested during a demonstration in Park-e Laleh in Iran.
She has been arrested on numerous occasions for her political activities. She is also a member of “Mothers of Khavaran.” Khavaran is the south Tehran cemetery used as mass grave for political prisoners who were executed during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners, in which over 30,000 political prisoners were executed during a period of two months.
“Bohkish lost six close relatives to the 1988 massacre,” says Reporters without Borders.
