Senior Iranian reformist figure Abolfazl Ghadiyani has been given a new three-year sentence for the charge of “insulting” the Iranian leader.
The Kaleme website reports that Ghadiyan, a senior member of the reformist party the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution, was due to be released this month before he was slapped with a new three-year sentence.
Ghadiyani was first arrested in December of 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail for insulting the head of the government. In a public interview, Ghadiyani had referred to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “despot.” He had accused Ahmadinejad of pushing Iran into “deeper crises” and even “possible war.”
He also accused the Basij, plainclothes and military forces of derailing the 2009 elections and securing Ahmadinejad’s victory “in an act of coup d’etat.”
Iranian reformists allege that the outcome of the 2009 elections was engineered to secure Ahmadinejad’s victory and the true winner of the elections was in fact the reformist candidate MirHosein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since last February for refusing to recognize the Ahmadinejad administration as the legitimate government of Iran.
