TEHRAN — The Iranian judiciary confirmed on Tuesday that a prominent Iranian-Canadian blogger is under arrest over remarks he allegedly made about key figures in the Shiite faith, local media reported.
Hossein Derakhshan’s “case is under preliminary investigation and he is in custody,” the ILNA news agency quoted judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi as saying.
“Among the accusations, there are issues involving ‘Aemmeh Athar’ and some charges that have been made,” Mr. Jamshidi said, referring to the 12 successors of the Prophet Mohammed who are central figures in Shiite Islam.
The spokesman did not say when Mr. Derakhshan was arrested or where he is being held.
His highly political Internet diary, hoder.com, has not been updated since October 30 and some reports outside Iran said he had been arrested on November 1 shortly after arriving in Tehran on a private visit.
A conservative Iranian website said in November that Mr. Derakhshan had been arrested over suspicions of spying for Israel.
Dubbed the Iranian “blog father”, Mr. Derakhshan, 34, sparked a revolution in blogging in the Islamic republic by posting precise instructions in 2001 on how to set up Persian-language blogs, which have burgeoned to around 70,000 in recent years.
Mr. Derakhshan visited Iranian archfoe Israel using his Canadian passport in 2006 and chronicled his experience on his Persian and English blogs, saying he sought to show Israelis and Iranians a different image of each country.
“This might mean that I won’t be able to go back to Iran for a long time, since Iran doesn’t recognise Israel... and apparently considers travelling there illegal. Too bad, but I don’t care,” he wrote in January 2006.
“As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there,” he said.
Mr. Derakhshan worked as a journalist for Iran’s reformist press in the late 1990s before moving to Canada, mainly writing about the Internet.
In the past, Mr. Derakhshan was strongly critical of Iran’s conservatives but in the past year he has expressed support for hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his defiant stance against the West.
He has also criticised the positions of Israel and the United States on Iran’s nuclear programme, which they charge is cover for a weapons drive, something Tehran strongly denies.
The blogger has also been critical of many Iranian reformists and human rights activists.
Mr. Derakhshan’s blog is filtered by many Internet service providers in Iran, which has blocked access to more than five million Internet sites, whose content is mostly perceived as immoral, un-Islamic or anti-social.
Several bloggers have been detained over their writings and on Tuesday the Iranian parliament adopted legislation that imposes jail terms of up to two years and fines for those convicted of Internet crimes.
The offences include “spreading lies” which disturb public mind as well as publishing and promoting pornographic material on the web, news agencies reported.
It also penalises service providers who fail to filter material branded as illicit by a watchdog body.
It is not the first time that Iran has detained a dual national.
Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died while in custody in 2003 after being detained for photographing a demonstration outside a Tehran prison.
In May 2007, US-Iranian academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh along with California-based peace activist Ali Shakeri were arrested and held for more than 100 days, also on suspicion of causing harm to national security.
