Iran’s police chief, Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, has acknowledged that protesters detained in post-election unrest were tortured in custody, but says the deaths of detainees were caused by illness, not torture. The police commander has fired the head of a detention facility that was ordered closed last month. Three guards at the Kahrizak prison have also been detained on charges of mistreating prisoners. Read more here
Iranian authorities have shut down the Association of Iranian Journalists, when armed men raided and sealed the Tehran offices. Five journalists have been released in the past week including: Massoud Kurdpour, who just completed a one year jail term, Ali-Reza Beheshti, editor-in-chief of Kalameh Sabz and Kambiz Nouroozi, and director of legal affairs at the Association of Iranian Journalists. CPJ has also confirmed the arrest of Fatima Khavari, director of the weekly newspaper Chragh and Omid Selimi, a photographer who worked for Nesf e Jehan newspaper in Esfahan. Read more here
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that the United States has “expressed our concern about Maziar Bahari’s confinement and trial” to the Canadian government and offered to help. Newsweek’s Tehran correspondent was detained on 21 June as part of Iran’s post-election crackdown on the media. This week her husband, Bill Clinton, returned from North Korea having obtained the release of two imprisoned US journalists. Read more here
Social networking site Twitter has come under a denial of service (DNS) attack, the site reports. The source of the attack is unkown. Twitter was a key part of reporting on unrest after Iran’s disputed elections.
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