On April 11, 1992, Iranian authorities arrested 19-year-old Iranian cartoonist Hassan Karimzadeh, an employee at science magazine Farad. The arrest followed the publication of a drawing that conservative hardliners interpreted as an insulting caricature of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. After serving nearly 750 days in Tehran’s Evin prison, Karimzadeh was freed on April, 13, 1994 under a mass amnesty.
Following his arrest, conservative religious figures initially sought an apostasy decree against him — a religious or legal order declaring that a person has abandoned their faith — but this did not go ahead and he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to one year in prison, 50 lashes, and a cash fine.
On April 11, 1993, the judiciary increased his sentence to ten years in prison on the day he completed his term and was scheduled to go free. This extension followed heavy pressure from a defamatory press campaign in the state-run newspaper Kayhan, and the persistence of then-Tehran Revolutionary Prosecutor Ebrahim Raisi, Karimzadeh told CPJ on July 9, 2026. The sentence was revoked in 1994 under a mass amnesty.