Iranians detain liberal critic

A liberal critic of the hard-line clerics who rule Iran was detained on Sunday after several hours of interrogation, his wife said.

Journalist Sina Motallebi was taken to an undisclosed jail after he responded to a summons on Saturday to report to a police station for interrogation, Farnaz Ghazizadeh told The Associated Press.

“Sina has been summoned by the judiciary several times over the past four months. They object to materials on his website including interviews he gave to foreign media,” Ghazizadeh said.

Ghazizadeh said she did not believe a police promise to release her husband within two days.

Motallebi developed the Farsi website rooznegar.com after the reformist daily Hayat-e-Nou, or New Era, for which he wrote, was banned by the hard-line judiciary in January over a cartoon showing the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution, being crushed by a hand.

The editor of Hayat-e-Nou, Hadi Khamenei, is the younger brother of Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hadi Khamenei opposes his older brother’s policies.

Since early 2000, Iran’s hardline judiciary has closed down about 90 pro-democracy publications and jailed several dozen writers and activists on vague charges of insulting the authorities.

The crackdown is widely seen as part of a power struggle between reformists who support President Mohammad Khatami’s programme of social and political reforms and hardliners who oppose any dilution of clerical rule and resist change through the unelected institutions they control, including the judiciary and police.