Tehran:
A day after Iran's president defended his country's record in permitting criticism, opposition Web sites reported on Wednesday that the second dissident Iranian journalist in less than a week had been incarcerated on charges including "propaganda against the state."
The Web sites said the journalist, Emadeddin Baghi, had been ordered jailed for six years for offenses that also included collusion to commit acts "against national security." The sentencing offered further evidence of Tehran's determination to suppress dissent after widespread protests following disputed elections in June 2009.
On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visiting New York for a United Nations meeting, used a meeting with reporters to defend Iran's judiciary against criticism over the arrests of an estimated 500 journalists, activists and government officials after the elections, in which he was returned to power.
He told reporters that they did not understand Iran's judicial system.
"People criticize the government very harshly in fact, and we don't create any restrictions on it," he said.
But opposition Web sites said Baghi's sentence related directly to an interview he conducted with a dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, which was broadcast on the BBC's Persian language service just after his death in December 2009.
Baghi was detained shortly after the broadcast and has been held in solitary confinement for long periods, human rights Web sites have reported. He had already spent a total of four and a half years in Iranian prisons beginning in 1998, when he published an exposé of political killings known as the "chain murders."
The opposition Web site reports stated that other charges against Baghi included "relations with Unicef" -- the United Nations Children's Fund -- for the purposes of investigating the fate of minors held in Iranian prisons.
"He appears to be an Iranian citizen, but he has tried with all his efforts to bring to fruition the aims of hostile countries," the justification for his sentence was quoted as saying.
Mr. Baghi had already been sentenced last month to one year in prison and a five-year ban on all media activities on separate charges relating to his participation in a group set up by opposition leaders to defend the rights of postelection detainees. He was in court facing other charges relating to the group when he received the sentence for the BBC interview, the report said.
On Sunday, Shiva Nazar-Ahari, 26, founder of the Tehran-based Committee of Human Rights Reporters was sentenced to six years in prison after being charged this month with political offenses including "inciting public opinion," "propaganda against the system" and "moharebeh," or "waging war against God," a crime for which the Islamic Republic executed two post election protesters in January.
According to her lawyer, Mohammad Sharif, more than half of Ms. Nazar-Ahari's six-year sentence is to be served in a remote location in Iran's southwestern province of Khuzestan, about 280 miles from Tehran. Sharif said that he would appeal the sentence, which he described as "having no legal basis."
"I cannot imagine that Shiva will be able to endure three and a half years in a prison like that," Sharif was quoted as telling the Committee of Human Rights Reporters Web site. Sharif also said that Ms. Nazar-Ahari would pay a $400 fine in lieu of 76 lashes.
Also this week, the family of a well-known Iranian-Canadian blogger who was arrested after he returned to Iran nearly two years ago, said that prosecutors in his case were demanding that he be sentenced to death.
According to the BBC's Persian-language Web site, sources close to the blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, said that the death penalty had been requested in a closed session of court in which he was accused of charges including "cooperating with hostile governments" and insulting Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Ahmadinejad.