Iranian courts show signs of leniency

Press, 11 April 1979, Page 8

Iranian courts show signs of leniency

SZFA-Reuter Teheran An Iranian Army colonel was executed early yesterday but, for the first known time, a revolutionary court fianded down sentences other than death after secret trials, the official Iranian P.A.R.S. news agency has resorted. The agency said Colonel ilusang Tavana went before a firing squad after being found guilty of taking pan. in the killing of hundreds of civilians on September 8 last year in Teheran. The killings, on the first day of martial law. became known as the “Jaleh Souare massacre.” But a torturer for the Shah’s former secret police, Savak, was given only three years imprisonment and the sentence was later reduced to one year with two years mspended because the defendant was full of regret, iccording to the agency. Sixteen other people were acquitted after giving the tourt bonds of good conduct

after careful investigation, the agency said. At least 73 people are known to have been executed by firing squads since the February revolution which toppled the Shah. There have been 29 executions in the last four days after the announcement of new regulations allowing the death penalty for political crimes.

As the swift, secret revolutionary trials continued, the provisional Government denied that the Justice Minister (Mr Assadollah Mobasheri) had resigned in protest against the executions. Sources close to Mr Mobasheri said he had offered his resignation after the execution at the week-end of the former Prime Minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, but that it had been rejected by Iran’s supreme ruling body, the Revolutionary Council.

Rejection of the Minister’s resignation reflected the relative importance of the provisional Government. An official spokesman said earlier that the Government had

had no advance knowledge of Mr Hoveyda’s trial or execution. An international group of lawyers just back from Iran has said in Paris that conditions in Teheran’s Qasr Prison conformed with United Nations standards of detention. But they condemned the secret trial and rapid execution of Mr Hoveyda and said such hearings continued “because there is no central authority in Iran and the Government does not control what the revolutionary committees do.” A spokesman for the group said that although they had no accurate figures for' the number of political prisoners throughout the country, all the indications his group had received pointed to a figure of between 2500 and 3000. Meanwhile, Iranian oil production has reached 4M barrels a day — almost twothirds of the normal output before last autumn’s oil workers’ strike, the Iranian national radio has said.