Sajjad Ghaderzadeh said his mother and her lover, Issa Taheri, were both guilty of murder. “I consider my mother and Issa Taheri to be the murderers of my father and both are guilty,” Ghaderzadeh told journalists from international news organizations in Tabriz where his mother is jailed.
Ghaderzadeh, who was arrested in October, said he was freed on bail of $40,000 posted by a relative December 12.
His meeting with the media was arranged by the provincial justice department at a guesthouse belonging to a government welfare organization. Judiciary officials were in the room watching, so Ghaderzadeh knew that everything he said was being monitored. He did not stray from the official line in his meeting with reporters.
His mother also made a camera appearance for journalists on Saturday in what officials termed an “out of prison visit” with family. Journalists were shown a film clip in which she was seen at the guesthouse eating dinner and chatting quietly with her son.
She did not make any comments to reporters and her teenaged daughter, who was also present, appeared to be trying to avoid the cameras.
“My mother has been sentenced to stoning…. I want her death sentence to be dropped. This is my request,” said Ghaderzadeh, adding that he hoped the sentence would be stayed as Iran’s former Judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, had backed the suspension of such sentences.
Ghaderzadeh said he intentionally made his mother’s case “controversial” in order to save her, but acknowledged that his plan had backfired. Many, however, believe his mother would already be dead if the young man had not gone on the Internet and publicized his mother’s case
“I thought if the case becomes controversial, she would be freed. But it did not happen,” he said in Persian with a heavy Azeri accent.
“I planned this myself and searched on the Internet and found Mina Ahadi,” the Germany-based activist who has championed his mother’s case.
He said Ahadi put him in contact with Mohammad Mostafai, who became the first lawyer handling his mother’s case.
Ghaderzadeh criticized Mostafai, the two German journalists and the second lawyer, Javid Houtan Kian, who is in custody, saying they had all “worsened” his mother’s case.
“He [Mostafai] charged 20 million rials ($2,000) and then escaped without even meeting me or my mother,” Ghaderzadeh said, disputing the lawyer’s remarks that his father was a drug addict and used to force Ashtiani into prostitution.
“What Mostafai recently said—that my father was a drug addict—is a lie. He has made this up,” said Ghaderzadeh, accusing the lawyer of using the case to seek asylum outside Iran.
Mostafai fled Iran last year and now has asylum in Norway. The government later allowed his wife and daughter to join him in Norway. Contrary to what Ghaderzadeh said, Mostafai has said he met the convicted adulteress once in her cell in December 2009. Mostafai also said last week that Ashtiani had in fact helped in the murder of her husband.
Ghaderzadeh said, “I want to complain against Ahadi because she abused the case, Mostafai for his false interviews, Houtan Kian for his advice to make the case more controversial and the two German reporters who entered the country as tourists,” he said, adding that he made a “mistake” in talking to them.
Ghaderzadeh also criticized Taheri and said it was “desperation” in the initial days that made his family grant clemency to his mother’s lover, which led to Taheri’s release after a short term in prison.
“The question is: why is Taheri free?,” the son asked. “He misused our desperation at that time to get our approval [of clemency], but I will get Issa even if I have to study law.” Under the Iranian penal code, a murder victim’s family can offer clemency to the killer.
Meanwhile, the head of East Azerbaijan’s judiciary, Malek Ajdar Sharifi, said certain “ambiguities” still remained in the “evidence” gathered in Ashtiani’s case, and this was causing the delay in taking a final decision over the verdict.
The cleric said it was easy to issue a verdict in a case where the murderer clearly confesses to his crime. “But in this case where the defendant denies or makes justifications and there are ambiguities in the evidence, the procedure gets prolonged,” he said.
Ashtiani was sentenced to death by two different courts in Tabriz in separate trials in 2006.
Her sentence to hang for her involvement in her husband’s murder was commuted to a 10-year jail term by an appeals court in 2007.
But a second sentence to death by stoning on charges of adultery leveled over several relationships, notably with the man convicted of her husband’s murder, was upheld by another appeals court the same year.
In remarks attributed to her and released by the government Saturday, she reportedly said she wants to sue “the two German” journalists, her former lawyer Mostafai, anti-stoning campaigner Ahadi and her husband’s convicted murderer.
“I have told Sajjad [her son] … to sue the ones who have disgraced me and the country…. I have a complaint against them,” she said.
The two German journalists from Bild am Sonntag were arrested October 10 in Tabriz for interviewing Ashtiani’s son and second lawyer.
Iran says the two Germans entered the country on tourist visas and failed to obtain the necessary accreditation for journalists before “posing as reporters” when they contacted her family.
Ashtiani was reported as saying, “I am willing to talk because many people exploited [the case] and said I have been tortured, which is a lie…. Leave my case alone. Why do you disgrace me?”
A German foreign ministry spokesman dismissed the comments attributed to Ashtiani. “The contents of the declarations relayed and the manner in which they were made really raise questions,” he said.
Ahadi too told Agence France Presse (AFP) in Berlin that Ashtiani’s remarks were made under “enormous pressure” exerted by “the Islamic regime of Iran.”
The deputy editor of Bild am Sonntag said he was “surprised and amazed” at Ashtiani’s remarks about the newspaper’s reporters. “We find it surprising that a woman sentenced to death in Iran could leave prison for a few hours to announce to the Western media that she wants charges against the journalists reporting on her case,” Michael Backhaus said.
Prominent Germans, including business leaders, ministers and top sports stars Sunday urged Iran to free the two journalists. About 100 Germans signed an appeal to Iran to free the men; statements from the signers filled 12 pages of Bild am Sonntag.
The signatories included former tennis ace Boris Becker, auto racer Michael Schumacher, soccer star Philipp Lahm, Nobel laureate Herta Mueller and the presidents of BMW, Daimler, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Telekom.
“The pair must be released and must return to Germany as soon as possible,” said Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.
“A state like Iran, which always calls for understanding, must not flout it in other areas,” wrote Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.
