Carton 90: “Dastardly and Unfair,” Says Sattar Beheshti’s Mother of Murderer’s Sentence

Almost two years after the death of dissident blogger Sattar Beheshti under torture while in police detention, Cyber police interrogator Akbar Taghizadeh was sentenced to three years in prison, two years in exile, and 74 lashes for his murder. Giti Pourfazel, the Beheshti family lawyer, told Iranian Students News Agency that the verdict against Sattar’s killer was not appropriate. “In a country where journalists are sentenced to six years in prison, a three-year prison sentence against a murderer is strange,” she noted.

Sattar Beheshti, 35, a laborer and blogger, was arrested on October 30, 2012, by Iran’s Cyber Police and died under torture by his interrogator on November 3, 2012. Beheshti’s mother, Gohar Eshghi, has relentlessly objected to the Iranian Judiciary’s lack of interest in bringing the perpetrators of her son’s murder to justice.  Objecting to the relatively light sentence, she told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that “We do not accept it. It is dastardly and unfair.” This is cartoonist Touka Neyestani’s take on the matter.