Iran’s ‘butcher of the press’ unleashed on protestors

Saaed Mortazavi, a hardline prosecutor known and feared in Iran as the 'butcher of the press', has been appointed to interrogate the reformist protestors sent to jail since the disputed presidential election on June 12.

This is worrying news: Mortazavi has a brutal history of quashing dissent against his country’s political establishment. Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, says: "The leading role of Saeed Mortazavi in the crackdown in Tehran should set off alarm bells for anyone familiar with his record."

Mortazavi has made his mark in public office with a series of brutal crackdowns on press freedom. Since taking over as the prosecutor-general in Tehran in 2003, he has forced 100 newspapers, websites and journals to close. He has also overseen the arrest of numerous bloggers, many of whom spent long periods in solitary and were forced to sign false admissions of guilt.

 
Roxana Saberi, the American journalist who at one stage this summer faced up to eight years in jail on trumped up charges of espionage, also fell under Mortazavi's jurisdiction.
 
But the biggest black mark against his name was his involvement in the case of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian freelance photographer who died in police custody after she was arrested in 2003 for taking pictures outside a prison.
 
Though Mortazavi released a statement saying that the 54-year-old had died of a stroke, a doctor who saw Kazemi’s body claims that it showed obvious signs of torture, including a skull fracture, flogging marks, a broken nose, severe abdominal bruising, missing fingernails, and signs of having been brutally raped.