November 26, 2002	Tuesday	Ramazan 20, 1423

TEHRAN, Nov 25: Iran’s judiciary announced on Monday it would review the case of a prominent academic condemned to die for blasphemy, as a top government official said an outright ban had been slapped on student protests.

“Taking into account the order of the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), the Hashem Aghajari case will be reviewed,” IRNA quoted judicial spokesman Hossein Mirmohammad Sadeghi as saying.

Aghajari, a disabled veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and ally of embattled reformist President Mohammad Khatami, was sentenced to death by a hardline court on Nov 6.

But amid mounting student protests and widespread accusations that the court’s ruling was politically motivated, Khamenei stepped into the crisis on Nov 17 and ordered the judiciary — a bastion of Iran’s hardliners — to look again at the verdict.

The spokesman said the case would now be forwarded to the supreme court, but gave no date for the review, and warned that any further “racket over the case will affect the procedure”.

Up until Monday, the judiciary had insisted the case was following its “normal course”, drawing complaints from prominent reformists that it was failing to respond quickly enough to Khamenei’s intervention.

But reformists also appeared to step in to reduce tensions over the case, with Deputy Science Minister Gholam-Reza Zarifian confirming that further student protests over the verdict had been banned.

“It is a decision, approved by the national security council, not to have any more gatherings,” the reformist minister told the Entekhab newspaper.

Nationwide demonstrations by university students in support of Aghajari, who had questioned the conservatives right to rule, began on Nov 9 and have continued to mount despite Khamenei’s intervention.

The protests, coinciding with heightened political tensions between Iran’s reformists and conservatives, had also taken on wider political overtones, including demands for the release of political prisoners and more freedom of speech.

“Now the court’s verdict has entered a new stage after the supreme leader’s initiative,” Zarifian argued, adding: “We have asked officials to convince students to prevent gatherings.”

The science ministry is responsible for running Iran’s universities, and the deputy minister argued that officials were eager to prevent the protests spiralling out of control.

Many officials have feared a repeat of the events of July 1999, when student protests degenerated into several days of bloody street clashes. On Friday, Khamenei also denounced the protests.

“The close cooperation between the science minsitry, security forces and the intelligence ministry did not allow the crisis to turn into a national crisis or a disaster worse than the July student unrest,” Zarifian told the paper.

The protests have so far been largely peaceful — despite the chanting of some radical anti-government slogans — although there have been sporadic clashes between students and hardline vigilantes.

“The security forces made efforts to control the radicals from both sides,” he said.

On Sunday, Iran’s main reformist party called on students to ease protests, warning they risked sparking a major backlash from the Islamic republic’s hardliners.

Said Hajarian, a leader of the Islamic Iran Particpation Front (IIPF), told a press conference: “Certain people are ready to declare the country to be in a state of emergency.”

No student protests were reported Monday, and two rallies that were scheduled for Sunday were called off.—AFP