A 47-year-old website manager in Iran was arrested in March of 2017 by that country’s ministry of intelligence, who accused him of selling satellite TV access cards that promised viewers a TV lineup of 6,000 channels—including, say the Iranian authorities, some porn channels, according to the Iran Human Rights site.
Last Thursday, a judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced Mohammad Hossein Maleki to death.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, Maleki—the married father of two children—denied intending to sell access to porn. But the court found him guilty of “corruption on Earth” due to his sale of the satellite access cards. A source close to Maleki told the Center for Human Rights, on condition of anonymity, that Maleki’s case might have gone differently had it received more publicity.
“The authorities don’t have anything against him. They couldn’t even get a confession out of him,” the person told the Center. “But it was a mistake not to publicize his case until he was sentenced some 16 months later. We all made a mistake.”
Satellite TV is illegal in Iran. But the country has a thriving black market in satellite reception equipment and access cards, allowing Iranians to watch the television channels of their choice in the privacy of their homes. Selling the cards is a “common business” in Iran, one source told the Center.
“If his punishment is the death penalty, that means hundreds of people should be hanged,” a man who identified himself as Maleki’s boss at an online business site told the human rights center.
Even the court’s verdict acknowledged that Maleki was not in the porn business. But the judge said that he found Maleki’s reported claim “that the contents of the channels were not obscene but vulgar” unconvincing.
“Considering the sale of CCcam with vulgar content to 850 people which proves his extensive activity and also due to his connection with people abroad (Maleki) is subject to Article 286 of the Islamic Penal Code and, therefore, the court sentences him to (the) death penalty,” the judge wrote, in a verdict obtained by the Iran Human Rights site. CCam refers to a type of satellite TV service.
Maleki was arrested in Isfahan—a central-Iran city of about 2 million, located approximately 200 miles south of Tehran—and is being held in the Dastgerd Prison there.
But Maleki is not the first to receive a porn-related death sentence in Iran. In 2008, Saeed Malekpour—a resident of Canada who had married a Canadian citizen—returned to Iran to visit his terminally ill father, but was arrested within two days of arriving, according to a report in The Vancouver Sun.
Malekpour, 33 years old at the time of his arrest, was a freelance software engineer who created an open-source app for uploading images and video to the web. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard accused him of creating the software to upload porn, and grabbed him off the street.
An Iranian court sentenced him to death, after Malekpour gave a “confession,” reportedly under torture. His sentence was commuted to life in prison, and he still sits in prison in Iran today, 10 years after his arrest.
Photo via Center for Human Rights in Iran
