Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty for 30 year-old Soheil Arabi, who was convicted of insulting the prophet Mohammed in a Facebook post, according to a report at Al-Monitor on Tuesday.
According to Arabi’s lawyer, Vahid Moshkani Farahani, the Tehran court had originally sought the death penalty for Arabi for “insulting the prophet.” When the Supreme Court reviewed the case, it upheld the ruling and added the “corruption on Earth” charge, which also carries the death penalty.
Arabi was arrested on November 2013 along with his wife Nastaran Naimi, who was soon released. Naimi made no public comments until the Supreme Court ruling, and has since pleaded in various interviews with foreign-based media outlets for her husband’s life.
After the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in November, a Persian-language Facebook page was set up to raise awareness about the sentence. Naimi said that the evidence used against her husband consisted of Facebook printouts and that her husband confessed “under pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
Al-Monitor further reports:
The Revolutionary Guard Corps has recently become highly active in pursuing so-called “cyber crime” in Iran. In December 2013, the group announced it had arrested “cyber activists” in Kerman who had connections to foreigners.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is reportedly behind an Iranian hacker group that has attacked infrastructure worldwide and compromised airports in at least three countries.
Iranians who appeared in YouTube videos lip-syncing and dancing to the Pharrell Williams song Happy and celebrating Iran’s World Cup team have previously been prosecuted. Executions in Iran have risen sharply since Hassan Rouhani became president last year, surpassing 900 in October. In September, a man was hanged in Iran for insulting the prophet Jonah, while Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was convicted of killing the man who attempted to rape her, was hanged in October. One of Rouhani’s first appointments, justice minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, is known as “Minister of Murder” for his role in thousands of summary executions in the late 1980’s.
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