Iran sentences daughter of former president to five years in prison
By Celine Alkhaldi, CNN
The daughter of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been sentenced to five years in prison, her lawyer said Tuesday.
The verdict against Faezeh Hashemi, who is a known Iranian activist, is “not final,” the lawyer, Neda Shams, said in a tweet. “The client is still in prison and there are other cases against her,” Shams added.
Hashemi was indicted last year by Tehran’s public prosecutor on charges of “propaganda against the system,” state-aligned news agency ISNA said on Tuesday.
She was arrested and transferred to Evin prison in September, according to ISNA.
Iran has detained a number of high-profile activists in recent months, including writer and poet Mona Borzouei, singer Shervin Hajipour and Iranian football player Hossein Mahini, as anti-government protests rocked the country.
Over the past decade, Hashemi has been jailed several times for making anti-government statements and participating in protests.
She spent months in prison after a 2012 arrest for making anti-government statements.
Her father was a revolutionary who fought the Shah’s regime and its Western-leaning social and economic policies but pushed for liberalization and privatization programs when he became president a year after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Rafsanjani died in 2017 aged 82.
As many as 41 more protesters have received death sentences in recent months as officials attempt to crack down on the swell of angry public sentiment across Iran, according to statements from both Iranian officials and in Iranian media reviewed by CNN and 1500Tasvir, but the true number could be much higher.
The executions on Saturday of two young men in Iran, one a karate champion, the other a volunteer children’s coach, in connection with the nationwide protests, sparked outrage around the world.
The total number of people now known to have been executed in connection with the protests, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in police custody in September, has reached four.
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CNN’s Rob Picheta, Artemis Moshtaghian, Sahar Akbarzai, Tara Subramaniam, Jomana Karadsheh and Niamh Kennedy contributed reporting
