Afghan student Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh has been freed from prison after he was secretly pardon by Afghanistan’s President Karzai. Kambakhsh was sentenced to death, commuted to imprisonment, after he was accused of circulating an article that questioned the role of women in the Quran.
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We must do everything in our power to secure the release of the young Afghan journalist, says Padraig Reidy
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A young reporter has been found guilty of blasphemy, writes Harun Najafizada in Balkh
A primary court in the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan has sentenced local journalist Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh to death.
Kambakhsh, 23, a reporter for Jahan-e Naw (New World) weekly and a student of journalism at Balkh University has been accused of blasphemy and misrepresenting the verses of the Quran.
On Tuesday afternoon, the primary court of Mazar-e Sharif convened a session behind closed doors and announced the verdict after a three-hour discussion.
The session, which was not attended by defending lawyers, journalists or human rights defenders, or even by Kambakhsh’s relatives, has been widely criticised for issuing such a strong sentence and ignoring the Afghan constitution.
Kambakhsh, who was arrested three months ago by the National Security Department (the intelligence service) and kept in prison, had downloaded an article from an Iranian website and distributed it to his friends.