Laylaz, editor of the daily business journal Sarmayeh and a vocal critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic policies, was arrested at home on June 17, his wife, Sepharnaz Panahi, told the BBC Persian service. She said that officers searched their home and confiscated videotapes, hard drives, and letters.
Laylaz was among more than 100 opposition figures and journalists who faced a mass, televised judicial proceeding in August on vague antistate accusations, according to local and international news reports. He spent 100 days in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin Prison before being moved to a group cell, where he was denied newspapers, pen, and paper, his wife told the Committee of Human Rights Reporters.
Laylaz was charged with “congregation and mutiny against national security, propagation against the regime, disrupting public order, and keeping classified documents,” according to Mowjcamp, a news Web site supportive of the defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
After a two-hour trial in November, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency and online accounts. His wife told the news Web site Kalameh that the “classified document” that was a centerpiece of the prosecution was actually a published and widely available investigation into the Iranian judiciary.