Iranian blogger accused of spying for Israel – report
Published: Wednesday, November 19, 2008
00:01GMT—7:01PM/EST
BLOGGER – SPY – ISRAEL
Washington, 18 November (IranVNC)—Well-known Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been arrested and is being interrogated several weeks after his return to Iran, reports today the conservative news website, Tabnak, run by the former commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, Mohsen Rezai.
During preliminary interrogations, Derakhshan reportedly confessed to having spied for Israel, Tabnak adds, characterizing his confession as “containing some complicated points”.
Hossein Derakhshan, who calls himself Hoder, is a controversial figure in the Persian blogging community.
A self-described admirer of the late leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he first moved to Canada in 2000 and started his blog on 25 September 2001.
He was at first hailed as a dissident-blogger by many, mostly non-Persian sources, but since then has come to lose many of his Iranian readership as he has increasingly attacked human rights activists, women rights activists and political prisoners in Iran, and has staunchly defended the government of the hardliner-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Derakhshan, who would regularly visit the U.S. to participate in conferences on the media and give interviews to Iranian as well as American news outlets such as New York’s Daily Sun and Voice of America’s Persian Service as a blogger critical of Iran, turned especially anti-American when, following an entry in his blog that he was residing in Brooklyn, New York, he was told by US authorities in November 2005, that he could not reenter the country because he had no residence visa.
Tabnak reports that Derakhshan had in the past traveled to Israel to participate in a seminar entitled “reform, opposition and conflicts in the Middle East,” held at Ben Gurion University in the town of Beersheba, where he delivered a speech entitled, “Blogging: A real avenue for dissent in the Middle East”.
Derakhshan, who regularly travels to Iran, has been detained and interrogated in the past, before being released.
Source: Tabnak news website in Persian, Hossein Derakhshan’s blog in English and Persian
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