An Afghan court has sentenced a 23-year-old journalist to death for blasphemy, apparently after criticising the Prophet Mohammed’s views on women’s rights, and downloading and circulating material from the Internet. Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, a reporter on the Jahan-e Now daily newspaper and student of journalism at Balkh University, was arrested on Oct. 12 and charged with offending Islam and the Koran. Kambakhsh was sentenced to death by a court in the northern Balkh Province on Jan. 22. He has already filed an appeal against his sentence, family sources said.

“The death sentence was in accordance with Article 130 of the Constitution,” Shamsurrahman, head of the Balkh local court, said. This provision apparently gave the court authority to rule in accordance with highly orthodox Sunni Muslim jurisprudence in cases not covered by existing laws, according to sources. Kambakhsh had been charged after complaints by his fellow students at university, according to court documents. They had accused him of passing around blasphemous articles and “mocking Islam and the Koran.” His professors had claimed that he had interrupted lectures to fire off questions about Islam.

“We collected many documents that proved the accusations,” Shamsurrahman said. Shamsurrahman claimed that the case had been heard in an open court and reporters could have attended. But members of Kambakhsh’s family had not been invited because they were “not that important”. “All our hearings are held in the open,” he declared, responding to widespread criticism that the public had been barred from observing the trial. A national security officer, said that books on religion belonging to Kambakhsh and messages on his mobile telephone had also shown that he had “mocked” Islam.

Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, brother of the condemned journalist and himself a reporter for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), dismissed the accusations as a baseless attempt to stifle freedom of the press. “The court’s verdict is unfair and the conduct of the trial was a violation of human rights,” he said. “My brother told me only three judges and a prosecutor were present. Everything was decided beforehand. He said he was only invited in to hear the sentence being read out. ‘I wanted to say something but they wouldn’t allow me to comment’, he told me,” the brother said.

He added: “The article my brother is accused of writing was published on Internet websites years ago.” He was not the author, he insisted. Ibrahimi claimed that his brother was being made a scapegoat for his own writing for the IWPR. “This is a revengeful act aimed at me. The case is politically motivated.” The governor of Balkh Province, Atta Mohammad Nur, denied he had any role in the arrest of the journalist.

But clerics in Balkh and Konduz provinces have already asked the government not to back down and release Kambakhsh unpunished. Some students would also strongly oppose any amnesty. Shortly after Kambakhsh’s detention, dozens gathered in Mazar-e-Sharif demanding the death penalty. In a letter to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, the president of the European parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering has called “in the strongest possible terms” for a stay of execution. — IPS