IRAN: A crisis over the sentencing to death of a pro-reform academic took a turn for the worse yesterday, with both Iran's hardline judiciary and the condemned dissident refusing to lose face over the affair and dashing hopes of a quick resolution.
Four student leaders involved in more than two weeks of protests were also arrested in an apparently co-ordinated crackdown, student groups said, while a top commander of the Revolutionary Guards warned of a fierce response to any further demonstrations.
Despite the Islamic republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordering the judiciary to review the verdict, Iran's chief prosecutor said it was up to the dissident, Hashem Aghajari, to first lodge an appeal.
"In order for the case to be reviewed, Hashem Aghajari is obliged to make an appeal," Abdolnabi Namazi told the state news agency IRNA, saying the history lecturer and disabled veteran had until December 3rd to do so.
But Aghajari's lawyer, Saleh Nikhbakht, said no such appeal - which would enable the judiciary to save some face over the highly politicised affair - would be made, even if that meant his client would go to the gallows.
"My client is still determined not to appeal," Nikhbakht said, signalling that Aghajari was staying defiant over a case he views as being politically motivated. Nikhbakht said it was up to the judiciary, and not his client, to submit to Khamenei's order.
The stubborn stand-off complicates efforts by moderate reformists and conservatives to calm tensions surrounding the case, the cause of student protests and sporadic clashes between pro-reform university activists and hardline vigilantes.
And although protests have drawn to a halt amid an outright government ban, pro-reform students revealed that four top activists who played leading roles in organising protests were picked up in a crackdown. "Abdollah Momeni was arrested in the street by plain-clothes men who sprayed his companion with tear-gas, and Akbar Atri was arrested at his place of work," Ali Farokhi of the Office to Consolidate Unity (OCU) told AFP.
The OCU has been behind many of the nationwide protests that followed the verdict, and the demonstrations have been taking on increasingly overt political overtones with many activists demanding the release of all political prisoners and greater freedom of speech.
A third student, Said Razavi Faghih, a leader of the Islamic Students' Association, was arrested outside the Tehran university faculty where Aghajari taught, one of his associates said.
Faghih had also been a major organiser of protests - which began on November 9th - and had spoken out against the Islamic regime during the demonstrations.
And sources said Amir-Hossein Balali, a student from Amir Kabir technical university who had also made outspoken comments during the protests, was also picked up.
Aghajari, a history lecturer, was convicted in the western city of Hamedan after saying that Muslims were not "monkeys" and should not blindly follow the teachings of senior clerics.