Concern grows about imprisoned journalists as country's main paper is shut down

Reporters Without Borders today denounced the closure of the country's biggest daily newspaper, Hamshari, and said it was concerned about the fate of two arrested journalists. Five reformist papers have now been shut down in the past three weeks by the regime's hardliners. "The present offensive against Iran's most popular newspapers is alarming and the excuse for the closure of Hamshari is clearly bogus," said Reporters Without Border secretary-general Robert Ménard. "At this rate, the non-conservative press will simply disappear in Iran," he said, calling for the ban on all five papers to be lifted at once and for the two journalists to be freed, along with seven others. There are more journalists in prison in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East. Hamshari was suspended for 10 days after refusing to print a right-of-reply article from Ali-Reza Majub, secretary-general of the government-controlled trade union, the Workers' House, and other officials. The paper has been singled out by the authorities, who have banned its circulation beyond the capital, on the pretext that it is owned by the Teheran city authorities. At the same time, Taban, a paper in the northern town of Gazvin, was also suspended. Since the beginning of the year, three other papers, the dailies Hayat-é-No, Bahar and Nowrooz have been suspended. Little has been heard of the two journalists, Alireza Eshraghi and Ali-Reza Jabari, since their arrest on 12 January and 28 December last. Esraghi, of Hayat-é-no, was picked up after the paper reprinted on 8 January a 1937 US newspaper cartoon about the pressure exerted by then-President Franklin Roosevelt on the US Supreme Court, represented by a bearded, black-robed old man resembling the Islamic regime's founder, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was printed alongside an interview with a social science professor about "social collapse" in Iran. The cartoon was considered insulting to Khomeini's memory and the paper was closed. Esraghi is being held at Evin prison, near Teheran. On 19 January, intelligence ministry officials took him to his office and searched it. The same day, another Hayat-é-No journalist, Akram Didari, was summoned by the religious court for questioning. Jabari, a translator and freelance contributor to several independent newspapers, including Adineh, was arrested at his office in Teheran on 28 December by non-uniformed individuals. The next day his wife went to Adareh Amaken, a city police department considered close to the intelligence service and which has summoned many journalists for questioning in recent weeks. She was told nobody by the name of her husband had been arrested. She was given the same answer at the central police station. An interview with Jabari was published on 25 December in a Persian-language newspaper in Canada, Charvand, in which he said the country's hardline spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Guide of the Islamic Revolution, wanted the crisis in Iran to get worse. Jabari, a member of the Iranian Writers' Association, has translated many Iranian works, some of them banned, into English. His wife is concerned about his fate because he has heart problems.