Abbas Bozorgmehr, the director of the Aseman newspaper, was arrested and transferred to Evin Prison just hours after his newspaper was shut down.
The Aseman daily was shut down on Thursday morning, and Abbas Bozorgmehr was summoned to the Culture and Media Court to give certain explanations.
ISNA reports that Bozorgmehr was to be released on bail of three billion rials, but the office closed before bail could be posted and it won’t reopen until Saturday, so Bozorgmehr had to be transferred to Evin Prison.
Asman, which was only in its sixth day of publication, was shut down for publishing a statement about Qesas, the Muslim Sharia law of meting out punishment equal to the crime.
On Tuesday, the paper published a column on the memoirs of professors and students recalling the 1980s, and in one of the memoirs, Qesas is described as “inhumane.”
A number of conservative media outlets attacked the statement as an insult to Quranic decrees.
