Following his second arrest, Mehdi Mahdavi Azad spent 40 days in solitary confinement before he was released on bail. Fearing the outcome of his trial, he moved to Germany, where he now lives and work as a journalist.
Name: Mehdi Mahdavi Azad
Career: Journalist; managing editor at Shahab News and Aftab News websites; worked with various publications, including Payam-e Azadi Hayat-e Now, Aftab-e Yazd and Iran and Hamshahri newspapers; former research director at Hamshahri media; worked as an aide to Hassan Rouhani for five years.
Charges: Propaganda against the regime, activities to disrupt public order, and insulting the Supreme Leader and the president.
Mehdi Mahdavi Azad began his career as a journalist in 1999. On June 23, 2009, while he was working as the managing editor of Shahab News, forces from the Cyber Unit of the Revolutionary Guards arrested him. He was placed in solitary confinement in Cell Block 240 at Evin Prison.
Like the families of many other jailed journalists, his family was pressued into remaining silent about his arrest, and told not to speak to the media.
Mahdavi Azad spent a total of 40 days in solitary confinement and was subjected to prolonged interrogation sessions. He later stated that the majority of his interrogators treated him decently.
Prior to this, he was arrested following the publication of his book, which looked at the Islamic government’s nuclear policies; parts of it were also reprinted on the Aftab News site.
Amnesty International and the International Federation of Journalists issued statements calling for his release. He was released a bail amount of $75,000 while waiting for his trial to start.
He was tried by the Revolutionary Court presided over by Judge Moghisei in autumn, 2009. He was acquitted on charges of insulting the Supreme Leader — a charge that resulted from a speech he had given at Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign headquarters two weeks prior to the disputed election of 2009. But he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for “attempting to disrupt public order” after he spoke to Persian-language media based outside Iran and published statements from reformist presidential candidates. Judge Moghisei also sentenced him to 74 lashes for writing an article promoting Mousavi, and not former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during the elections.
He appealed but before the appeal court’s had issued its verdict, he crossed the Iranian border, eventually making his way to Germany, where he now lives and works as a journalist.
For more information, visit Journalism is Not a Crime, documenting cases of jailed journalists in Iran.
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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