Around the world.

Journalist Gets 35 Lashes, Jail For Insulting Ayatollah

January 28, 1996|By Richard Bashor.

TEHRAN — A Tehran court has sentenced a leading Iranian author and magazine editor to 35 lashes and 6 months imprisonment for "publishing lies" and insulting Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, newspapers said Saturday.

The daily Iran said the court also banned Abbas Maroufi from working as a journalist and closed his literary monthly Gardoon.

The ruling said Gardoon had insulted Khamenei in an article allegedly comparing the Iranian leader to the late Shah of Iran Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was forced into exile by the 1979 Islamic revolution, the paper said.