Death sentence set for opposition journalist
An Iranian opposition journalist who played an active role in widespread protests that engulfed the country in 2017 and 2018 has been sentenced to death, Iranian authorities said Tuesday, months after he disappeared in neighboring Iraq and ended up in his home country under murky conditions.
The activist, Ruhollah Zam, was found guilty by a court in Tehran of “corruption on earth,” a term often used to describe attempts to overthrow the Iranian government, according to Gholam Hossein Esmaili, a judiciary spokesperson who announced the death sentence at a news conference on Tuesday, Iranian news outlets reported.
Zam ran Amad News, a website and popular channel on the messaging platform Telegram, out of France, where he had lived since 2011 as a refugee. His Telegram account had more than 1 million followers, and he used it to post information about Iranian officials and share logistics about the protests that rocked the country.
The 2017 protests were triggered by a jump in food prices and started in the city of Mashhad. The protests soon grew into an antigovernment movement that turned against the country’s ruling class and spread to dozens of cities.
Zam’s own story of how he ended up in Iranian detention remains murky. He left France on Oct. 11, according to the French foreign ministry. Zam’s wife, Mahsa Razani, who is living in Paris with the couple’s child, said he had disappeared not long after arriving in Baghdad from Paris.
Zam’s trial began in February, without a defense lawyer, according to Reporters Without Borders. He was accused of spreading propaganda against the Iranian regime, cooperating with the United States and spying for the Israeli and French intelligence services.