Iran's hardline judges to review death sentence imposed on leading academic

IRAN: Iran's judiciary announced yesterday that it would review the case of a prominent academic who has been condemned to death…

IRAN: Iran's judiciary announced yesterday that it would review the case of a prominent academic who has been condemned to death for blasphemy. In a simultaneous announcement, a senior government official said that an absolute ban had been imposed on student protests.

"Taking into account the order of the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\], the Hashem Aghajari case will be reviewed," IRNA quoted judicial spokesman Hossein Mirmohammad Sadeghi as saying.

Aghajari, a Tehran university history lecturer, who is an ally of the embattled reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was sentenced to death by a hardline clerical court on November 6th. He had said that Muslims were not "monkeys" and should not blindly follow the teachings of senior clerics - a comment which challenged the Shi'ite doctrine of emulation and the very basis of Iran's Islamic regime.

Following mounting student protests, Ayatollah Khamenei intervened in the crisis on November 17th and ordered the judiciary - a bastion of Iran's hardliners - to look again at the verdict.

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The judicial spokesman said that the case would now be forwarded to the Supreme Court, but he gave no date for the review and warned that any further protests would affect the procedure.

Up to yesterday, the judiciary had insisted that the case was following its "normal course", drawing complaints from prominent reformists that it was failing to respond quickly enough to Khamenei's intervention.

Reformists also appear to have stepped in to reduce tensions over the case, with the deputy science minister, Gholam-Reza Zarifian, confirming that further student protests over the verdict had been banned.

"It is a decision, approved by the National Security Council, not to have any more gatherings," the reformist minister told the Entekhab newspaper.

The science ministry is responsible for running Iran's universities and the deputy minister insisted that officials were anxious to prevent the protests spiralling out of control.

Many officials with links to the government have expressed fears of a repeat of the events of July 1999, when student protests degenerated into several days of bloody street clashes in Tehran.