Iranian blogger sentenced to death

Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, sentenced to two years and a half of jail because of ‘outrage’ against the Ayatollah Khamenei, died on 19th March 2009 in Evin prison. Sayafi’s lawyer, Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, has affirmed that, although the official report is not yet available, it might well be a case of suicide. Mir Sayafi suffered from a serious form of depression provoked by his detention. Dadkhah has made an official request for “an inquiry and an autopsy to shed light on the reasons for the death”, claiming that another prisoner, Dr. Hessam Firouzi “had warned the prison officers about the worrying health conditions of the prisoner”. “Dr. Firouzi called me from the prison to inform me that Omid had cardiac problems and that, once brought to the infirmary, doctors had not taken the situation seriously”. Sayafi had already been arrested in April 2008 and, on that occasion, had been released on bail after 41 days. Another Iranian blogger, Mojtaba Saminejad, spoke to Sayafi two days before his death: he was indeed waiting for a permit to leave the prison in order to undergo medical checks. During recent years Iran has launched a clampdown against bloggers and Web users considered hostile to authorities. Reporters without boundaries has declared to have been “profoundly shocked” by Sayafi’s death and has asked for an official inquiry. “We consider the Iranian authorities responsible for Sayafi’s death, in that he had been unjustly arrested and he had not even been granted proper medical care”. The majority of the articles published on Mir Sayafi’s blog concerned traditional Iranian culture and music. The Iranian context In Iran strict information control is in force, a control that can result in censorship and reclusion for all dissidents. Iranian blogs remain sources of independent information. Iran is the country with the highest number of blogs in the world: the number of personal web pages set up by Iranian users is in fact around 700,000. Mir Sayafi’s blog was removed from the web after the sentence was pronounced. It is still possible to find some archive copies of his interventions until 2008, in Farsi language. Mir Sayafi, before being arrested, declared in an interview with Human Rights Activists that his blog only dealt with cultural contents. The news about Sayafi’s death was covered by the media and can be found in a number of blogs and websites. In the Internet&Democracy website it is possible to find an intervention on the closure of an Iranian server of WordPress blogs. Iran Press Watch monitors and denounces the Iranian government’s abuses and information censorship. In addition, Campagna Facebook is promoting an inquiry into the governmental responsibilities of Sayafi’s death.