Iran Watch: Student Jailed Over Ahmadinejad Protest

Babak Zamanian, a student at Amir Kabir, in Tehran, is on crutches because of a beating earlier by supporters of President Ahmadinejad.

Remember the December 2006 Iranian student protests against Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Iranian students have disrupted a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a prestigious Tehran university, setting fire to his picture and heckling him.

“Some students chanted radical slogans and inflamed the atmosphere of the meeting” at the Amir Kabir University, said the semi-official Fars news agency on Monday, which is close to Ahmadinejad.

Well, Iran and Ahmadinejad strikes back today with the sentencing of one of the protesting students to one year in jail.

Guess that will l’arn ya……..

Babak Zamanian “was given the maximum sentence for acting against national security by propaganda against the system, which is punishable by three months to one year in jail,” lawyer Behnam Daraiezadeh said.

He said he would appeal the verdict against Zamanian, who was arrested in April 2007 and released on a 500-million rial (53,000 dollars) bail.

Zamanian was a student in Amir Kabir university, one of the most political hotbeds in the capital, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was heckled during a 2006 speech to students.

Three other Amir Kabir students have been sentenced to jail terms of up to three years on charges of publishing anti-Islamic images in four reformist student newspapers.

Ahmad Ghassaban, Ehsan Mansouri and Majid Tavakoli denied the charges, accusing political foes of planting the images in the newspapers to discredit them. They are still being held despite expectations they would be released on bail.

Guess you better take your protests off-shore if you want to protest in the land of brotherly love – Iran.

A student shouts slogans to disrupt a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Amirkabir university in Tehran December 11, 2006. Dozens of Iranian students burned pictures of President Ahmadinejad and threw firecrackers in an effort to disrupt his speech at a university on Monday, a presidential office spokesman said. It was first time the president, elected in a landslide in June 2005, had faced such open hostility at a public event.

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