The Injustice Against the Three Iranian Students

Their names are Ehsan Mansouri, Ahmad Ghassaban and Majid Tavakoli, they have also become known as the 'Polytechnic 3' amongst their student colleagues. They were accused of having insulted Islam and Islamic sacred figures in the student publications, a charge that they immediately and vehemently denied.

In an open letter they immediately stated that the publications were fake and carried out by the University Baseej militia to lay the ground for their arrests and imprisonment.

"...At a time when the slightest criticism of the state's policies can lead to our kidnap and imprisonment, how could we possibly have published such things?"

The parents of the three students also pleaded with the Islamic Republic's Head of Judiciary, Ayatollah Sharoodi, citing 15 methods of torture, their children had been subjected to in order to extract a false confession from them by Islamic intelligence interrogators.

At the end, it was too obvious that the publications were fake and the three students had nothing to do with them. After seven months of constant torture and intimidation, the Islamic courts had to concede that the three students had nothing to do with those publications, yet they still received 22 months (Ehsan Mansouri), 26 months (Ahmad Ghassaban) and 30 months (Majid Tavakoli)!! Why? As any sane person may ask. The Islamic court's reason was that the students had accused the university baseej militia of having published those articles. No further attempt was made to investigate who really was behind printing the insults. Suddenly that was not important.

It is amazing that when a writer, film maker, cartoonist or any private citizen in Europe is deemed to have insulted Islam, the Islamic Republic is at the forefront of the protests which demand to kill the offender, yet for its own political purposes the clerics and their lackeys in Iran are even prepared to make these insults against Islam themselves.