An Afghan court on Tuesday sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam, an official said.
The three-judge panel sentenced Sayad Parwez Kambaksh to death for distributing a paper that humiliated Islam, said Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the northern province of Balkh, where the trial took place. Judge Wahab did not preside over the trial.
Mr. Kambaksh's family and the head of a journalists group denounced the verdict and said Mr. Kambaksh was not represented by a lawyer at trial. Members of a clerics council had been pushing for Mr. Kambaksh to be punished.
The case now goes to the first of two appeals courts, Judge Wahab said. Mr. Kambaksh, who has been jailed since October, will remain in custody during appeal.
Judge Wahab said he did not immediately have the details of the paper that Mr. Kambaksh circulated, other than that it was against Islam. Mr. Kambaksh discussed the paper with his teacher and classmates at Balkh University and several students complained to the government, Judge Wahab said.
Apparently President Hamid Karzai has the power to pardon Kambaksh.
If Kambaksh is actually executed for saying less than flattering things about Islam, I suspect it will have significant repercussions in the West.
Here is the Reporters sans frontieres release:
A court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif today passed the death sentence on a young journalist, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, for alleged blasphemy. The trial was held behind closed doors and without any lawyer defending him. His brother, fellow journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, told Reporters Without Borders: “I saw my brother leave the court. He was very anxious. All the family was, too.”
“We are deeply shocked by this trial, carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Kambakhsh did not do anything to justify his being detained or being given this sentence. We appeal to President Hamid Karzai to intervene before it is too late.”
At a news conference yesterday, Hafizullah Khaliqyar, the deputy provincial prosecutor in charge of the case, threatened to imprison all journalists who support Kambakhsh, adding that “Kambakhsh has confessed to the crime and must be punished.”
Kambakhsh was supposedly arrested because of a controversial article commenting on verses in the Koran about women, although it has now been established that he was not the article’s author. Rahimullah Samandar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association, said he was in fact arrested because of articles written by his brother, Ibrahimi, criticising the provincial authorities.
A reporter for the newspaper Jahan-e Naw (“The New World”) and a journalism student at Balkh university, Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested on 27 October.