A vice president and senior aide under Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on Wednesday on charges of threatening the “internal and
external” security of the country, Fars News reported.
A top press aide to Ahmadinejad, Ali Javanfekr, received a sentence of four years in the same case.
Fars did not provide any further details on the cases involving the two top aides to Ahmadinejad, who served as president from 2005 until 2013.
NAN reports that Javanfekr, who is also the head of the state-run IRNA news agency, is one of dozens of Ahmadinejad’s allies detained since April 2011 in the fallout from a political feud between the president and the country’s supreme leader, Khamenei.
The case against Javanfekr began after he wrote in an official publication that the practice of women wearing a head-to-toe black covering known as a chador was not originally an Iranian practice but was imported.
Iran experienced a wave of newspaper closures during a confrontation between reformers and hard-liners during the 1997-2005 tenure of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami.
The judiciary has shut down more than 120 pro-reform newspapers and jailed dozens of editors and writers on vague charges of insulting authorities since 2000.(Reuters/NAN)
