A court in Iran has sentenced the son of one of Iran’s founding revolutionaries to six years in prison for releasing a decades-old tape in which his father denounced the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.

Media in Iran reported that a clerical court in the city of Qom on November 27 convicted Ahmad Montazeri of charges of “acting against national security” and “releasing a classified audio file.” The court initially sentenced Montazeri to 10 years on each of the charges, plus one additional year for abetting “antiregime propaganda.”

But it reduced the sentence to six years in view of his lack of previous convictions and the fact that his brother was killed in an attack by a Marxist group that Tehran views as a “terrorist organization.”

Montazeri, a 60-year-old Islamic cleric, is the son of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who for decades was the right-hand man to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Hossein Montazeri died in 2009.

This article courtesy of Radio Free Europe.

Image courtesy of ISNA