Authorities arrested Arya Jafari the day after he photographed protests against acid attack in Isfahan; his whereabouts and the charges against him are unknown.
Name: Aria Jafari
Born: 1988, Iran
Career: News and sports photographer for Isfahan media; worked with Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA).
Charges: Unknown, but most likely related to the photographs he took of the Isfahan acid attack protest.
Arya Jafari was working as a photographer for the ISNA when Revolutionary Guards arrested him at his home in Isfahan on October 23, 2014. The agents searched his house, confiscated his camera and personal belongings and took him to an unknown location.
On October 22, thousands of people protested outside Isfahan’s Bureau of Justice, calling for authorities to protect them after a series of acid attacks against women in the city. The media, including social networking sites and the international press, published Jafari’s photographs of the protest. Sources told IranWire that one of the reasons Jafari was arrested was because he sold images to Agence France Presse (AFP), a French news agency.
Since Jafari’s arrest, the hardliner media has attacked ISNA for publishing photos of the protest and news about the acid attacks, which were widely believed to have been carried out as punishment for or retaliation against women who do not observe “appropriate” Islamic dress. Hardliners have demanded that legal action be taken against media outlets that libel the Islamic regime and those faithful to its values and have blamed various sources for the attack, including extremist Sunni groups, the BBC and Western intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, Jafari’s fate remains unknown.
For more information, visit Journalism is Not a Crime, documenting cases of jailed journalists in This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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