Saeed Malekpour, 35, a permanent resident of Canada who was arrested in October 2008 on his return to Tehran for a visit, was reportedly convicted of designing and moderating adult content websites, acting against national security, insulting and desecrating the principles of Islam, and agitating the public mind.
In Toronto, Malekpour’s wife, Fatemeh Eftekhari, told The Guardian of Britain that her husband has been informed of his death sentence and has been transferred to solitary confinement while the Supreme Court reviews the sentence, as it does in all cases of capital punishment.
She says her husband was a web programmer who had written photo uploading software that was bought by a porn website without his knowledge. That website included his name in its credits.
Earlier this month, Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi told reporters in Tehran that two people had been sentenced to death for running porn websites, without naming the convicts.
“Two administrators of porn sites have been sentenced to death in two different court branches and the verdicts have been sent to the Supreme Court for confirmation,” Dolatabadi said.
Malekpour was initially kept in solitary confinement for almost a year without access to legal representation.
“For a long period we didn’t even know that he was arrested,” Eftekhari told The Guardian.
She said Malekpour’s arrest was part of a 2008 crackdown by the Iranian government on “indecent” websites to fight what the regime described as “the campaign launched by western governments to corrupt Iranian youth.”
A year after his arrest, Malekpour was shown on state television confessing. He later retracted the confession in a letter sent from inside prison in which he said it was made under duress.
“A large portion of my confession was extracted under pressure, physical and psychological torture, threats to myself and my family, and false promises of immediate release upon giving a false confession to whatever the interrogators dictated,” he wrote in the letter.
“Once in October 2008 the interrogators stripped me while I was blindfolded and threatened to rape me with a bottle of water.…
“While I remained blindfolded and handcuffed, several individuals armed with cables, batons, and their fists struck and punched me. At times, they would flog my head and neck. Such mistreatment was aimed at forcing me to write what the interrogators were dictating, and to compel me to play a role in front of the camera based on their scenarios.”
Eftekhari said: “Even if my husband’s charges were true, which they are not, it’s hard to imagine why he should be sentenced to death. I think Iran is trying to intimidate the opposition or any sign of protest by sentencing an unprecedented number of prisoners to death.”