Former Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi is currently suffering a sham trial for allegedly backing the recent “coup” against the elected government.
It’s all bollocks, of course, as this Washington Post piece explains:
Abtahi has been allowed to continue blogging from his prison cell by his “good friend the interrogator,” he writes, and he wants the Iranian people to know that he did not come under any pressure to change his mind about what he once decried as massive rigging by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters to keep the hard-liner in office.
But Abtahi’s family and friends say they don’t buy it. The blog, they say, is just one more example of a pervasive campaign by the government to purge the opposition through show trials and forced confessions after protests over the outcome of the June 12 election shook the foundations of the Islamic republic. The official results showed that Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, but the opposition believes that the tally was fraudulent and has said the election should be annulled.