THE GUARDIAN: Saeed Malekpour faces imminent execution on basis of confessions he retracted in letter, saying they had been beaten out of him
Saeed Malekpour was picked up by plainclothes officers in October 2008 and taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where he spent a year in solitary confinement without access to lawyers and without charge.
A year after his arrest, the 35-year-old appeared in a state television programme confessing to a series of crimes in connection with a porn website. On the basis of his TV confessions, he was convicted of designing and moderating adult materials online by a court in Tehran, which handed down [the] death penalty.
Malekpour later retracted his confessions in a letter sent from prison, in which he said they had been made under duress.
According to Malekpour's family, he is a permanent resident of Canada and is a programmer who wrote photo-uploading software that was used by a porn website without his knowledge.
His sister, Maryam Malekpour, said the supreme court had confirmed the death sentence despite many discrepancies in the case. "Saeed's lawyers were told that his death sentence will be issued this week," she said in an interview with the Iranian website Roozonline.
After an international campaign and new expert evidence, the supreme court suspended Malekpour's death sentence in June 2011 and ordered a judicial review.
Speaking to the Guardian, Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, a human rights activist based in Toronto who has followed Malekpour's case closely, said: "Saeed is in imminent danger of execution. He has never been provided with a fair trial at any point during this horrific and twisted ordeal. » | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Wednesday, January 18, 2012
