Today a senior Iranian official admitted that about 4,000 people were detained in June’s post-election street protests. Judiciary spokesman Ali-Reza Jamshidi stated that 3700 detainees arrested during post-election incidents have been released and only 300 people were held for longer than a few days for being “involved in the riots.” Among those 300 people are numerous journalists. According to the Reporters Without Borders, Iran has become the world’s biggest prison for journalists and bloggers, with a total of 42 held. The organization accused Iran of mistreating the journalists and subjecting them to a great deal of psychological pressure. Reporters Without Border stated “They (the journalists) are illegally denied the right to visits by relatives and lawyers. Terror is at the heart of the methods used against them.”
In his article, Iran’s Most Wanted, Reza Aslan provides more details on the treatment of journalists in Iran:
Although the exact number of journalists who have been arrested in Iran is difficult to calculate, Reporters Without Borders estimates that as many as 50 reporters, editors, and bloggers are languishing in prison cells. Many more have gone into hiding. On one day alone, June 22, all 25 employees of Kalemeh Sabz, Mir Hossein Mousavi’s newspaper, were arrested in a security sweep. (According to Amnesty International, 22 of the 25 employees have since been released; the whereabouts of the other three remain unknown.)
Even members of the religious establishment have been targeted. On June 16, a midlevel cleric and vice president under President Mohammad Khatami, Mohammad Ali Abtahi—known to Iranians as the “Blogging Mullah”—was arrested at his home in Tehran. The popular blogger, whose site, webneveshteha.com, is a favorite destination of Iran’s reformers, was not seen again until Saturday, when state-run television showed him standing before a judge, along with dozens of other protesters, testifying that he was mistaken to suggest in his blog that the election results were fraudulent.
Below is a list of some of the journalists arrested by the Iranian government in the post-election turmoil. The list is taken from the Daily Beast:
Both Maziar Bahari and Mohammad Ali Abtahi appeared in the Daily Show episode on Iran: Jason Jones: Behind the Veil – Persians of Interest.
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