By: E&P Staff Forty-one Iranian journalists and bloggers have been detained in the one month since the disputed June 12 presidential elections in that country, the group Reporters without Borders announced Sunday.
Widespread protests and rioting broke out shortly after the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amid accusations of electoral fraud. In a statement published on its Web site, Reporters without Borders called for all the detained journalists to be released, and called special attention to five of the most recently detained reporters.
The five specifically mentioned were:
-- Tohid Bighi, who worked for a Web site which supported reformist presidential candidate Mehedi Karoubi. He was arrested on Saturday.
-- Photographer
Majid Saidi, who had reported from Afghanistan for Time magazine in 2001, was arrested on Friday by officials from the intelligence ministry.
-- Two female journalists: Henghameh Shahidi, who edited the pro-reform blog Paineveste and worked for reformist publications, was arrested on June 29.
-- Somaieh Nosrati, editor of the parliamentary pages of the newspapers Teheran Emoroz and Hayat No, who was arrested on June 21.
The whereabouts of the four are unknown.
Also named was Said Matinpour, a reporter for the weekly newspaper Yarpagh, who was imprisoned on Saturday after appearing before the Tehran Revolutionary Court. According to Reporters without Borders, he is being held in Evin prison in Tehran and is suffering from back and stomach ailments.
The statement came a week after the release of Iason Athanasiadis-Foden of the Washington Times. Athanasiadis-Foden, who is British-Greek, was arrested at Tehran airport June 19 as he was about to leave the country. He is the only non-Iranian journalist to have been detained since the unrest began.
To see some of the names and faces of the imprisoned journalists and bloggers, go
here.
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