Adnan Hassanpour, a Kurdish journalist whose death sentence was quashed in August 2008, was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison by the court in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj that retried his case, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has learnt from his family.
The death sentence was passed on Hassanpour on July 16, 2007 by a revolutionary tribunal in Marivan, in Iran’s Kurdish northwestern region, which found him guilty of subversive activities against national security, espionage and separatist propaganda. After first confirming the sentence on October 22, 2007, the supreme court in Tehran quashed it in August 2008 on procedural grounds. It said Hassanpour could not be regarded as “mohareb” (and enemy of God).
The case was returned to an ordinary court in Sanandaj for retrial. After hearing the case on September 6, 2008 and January 30, 2009, the court issued its sentence Wednesday. Hassanpour, who has staged two hungerstrikes in protest against the conditions in which he is being held, is currently in the main Sanandaj prison.
“This sentence is absurd and baseless,” RSF reacted. “One day, this journalist is sentenced to death. Two years later he gets a ten-year sentence. We reiterate our call for his immediate release.”
Aged 27, he was arrested outside his home on January 25, 2007, and was initially imprisoned in Mahabad, which is also in Iranian Kurdistan. He wrote about the very sensitive Kurdish issue for the magazine Asou, which has been banned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance since August 2005. He also worked for foreign media such as Voice of America and Radio Farda, which broadcasts in Farsi to Iran.
