New York, June 23, 2009--Iranian security agents
arrested about 25 employees of Kalameh Sabz, the reformist newspaper owned
by presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, after raiding the
paper's offices on Monday evening, according to local and international news
reports.
Alireza Beheshti, the paper's editor-in-chief, told the Farsi-language
service of Deutsche-Welle that the agents, in plain clothes but armed, rounded
up employees and confiscated computers at newspaper's offices in Haft Tir Square, Tehran.
He said the agents claimed to have a judge's warrant but did not produce it.
The government has blocked Kalameh Sabz from publishing since June 14, CPJ research shows.
The employees were believed to have been at the offices on Monday evening to
pick up their pay, according to local news reports.
Beheshti, who was not detained in the initial round-up, told
Deutsche-Welle he did not know where the employees had been taken. Soon after
the interview, Beheshti and his son, Sadra, were themselves arrested as they
were leaving the offices of Kalameh Sabz, according to several local news reports. The story
was reported locally by the online Farsi-language news sites Parlemannews, Fararu, Kodoom,
and Zamaanaeh.
Initial reports did not specify the employees' jobs. Those
arrested constituted a portion of the overall staff.
About 40 journalists and media workers have been detained
since the disputed June 12 presidential election and are still in government
custody as of late today, according to CPJ research. (Before the current
crackdown, at least six journalists were already jailed in Iran.)
"The government intended this crackdown to prevent the
people of Iran
and the world from witnessing the news as it took place. That may work to a
degree--but the price to Iran
has been very high. Iran
now appears to be jailing more journalists than any other country in the world,"
said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Mohamed Abdel Dayem. In CPJ's most recent census, in
December 2008, China
was the leading jailer with 28 journalists in prison.
Word of several additional arrests in Iran emerged
today. They included:
Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek freelance journalist working for The Washington Times, was
arrested in Tehran.
Athanasiadis had been covering
the elections and their aftermath for the newspaper.
Life.com said in a
statement that it believes photographer Amir
Sadeghi was taken into government custody over the weekend. Sadeghi had
contributed photos to the Web site. "We
ask the Iranian government to afford him all rights under Iranian law," Time
Inc. Editor-in-Chief John Huey said.
Mustafa Qwanlu Ghajar, a journalist with the monthly
magazine Sepideh Danaei who also blogs at Ghajar, was arrested on Monday, according
to local news reports. The details of his arrest were unclear.
Karim Arghandehpour, a journalist who also blogs at Futurama was arrested on June 17, according
to news reports. Arghandehpour wrote for the now-defunct reformist newspapers Salaam
and Vaghaa-ye-Ettefaaghyeh, according to the Tehran Bureau, a
news Web site.
Ahmad Zaid-Abadi, a well-known journalist who writes
a weekly column for the Farsi and English editions of Rooz Online, a
reformist news Web site, was arrested last week. Zaid-Abadi is also the
director of the Organization of University Alumni of the Islamic Republic of
Iran and a supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi.
CPJ reported details on the arrests of 13
journalists on Monday
and Friday.
Editor's note: The original version of this alert, posted at 1:06 EDT, was updated to include additional developments.