who had been living in Canada but was accused of working on pornographic websites.
The Guardian of Britain reported that the death sentence had been quashed for Saeed Malekpour, 35, who was detained in Iran in October 2008 while visiting his father.
Malekpour was accused of developing and moderating pornographic websites, “agitation against the regime” in Tehran and “insulting the sanctity of Islam.”
He had worked as a freelance website developer and programmer. Along the way, he designed a software program for uploading photos onto websites. A pornographic website that used his program carried his name as the developer of the program, friends said, but added he had nothing to do with the site and didn’t know his name was even on the site.
Defense lawyers said the conviction was quashed after the court was presented with expert evidence proving the defendant’s innocence.
Malekpour arrived in Canada in 2004 and was detained in Iran after returning in 2008 to visit his father.
After Malekpour was sentenced to death, Canada said it was “deeply concerned” by the verdict, but it did not intervene directly because Malekpour was not a Canadian citizen, just a permanent resident.
His wife, Fatima Eftekhari, told The Guardian from Toronto: “This a sigh of relief for me. I’m very pleased that his life is finally saved. It’s unbelievable that someone in this world has spent three years of his life in jail for merely designing software and was until now facing execution for that.”
In January, 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 then.
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 do battle with what they 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.”