An Iranian court reimposed the death sentence for blasphemy...

An Iranian court reimposed the death sentence for blasphemy against university professor and dissident Hashem Aghajari.
"The judge has .. maintained his original decision," Zekrollah Ahmadi, the judiciary chief for Hamedan province in western Iran, said.
"The decision must again be referred to Iran's supreme court," which rejected the earlier condemnation on technical grounds, Ahmadi said, adding that any technical flaws had now been rectified.
In November 2002, the Hamedan judge ruled that Aghajari had committed blasphemy and, in line with Islamic and Iranian law, deserved to die.
But following demonstrations by students and protests by reformists in the government, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded the sentence be reviewed. In January 2003, the supreme court ordered a re-trial.
Aghajari's lawyer Saleh Nikbakht said the defence had not been informed of the new ruling. "We are trying to verify," he said.
In the summer of 2002, the disabled war veteran and history professor delivered an explosive speech in Hamedan directed at the very core of Iran's 25-year-old Islamic regime.
Aghajari called for a "religious renewal" of Shiite Islam, espoused a major structural shake-up in Iran's religion of state, and asserted that Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" religious leaders.
For powerful conservative hardliners, those comments were seen as a frontal assault on the Shiite doctrine of emulation and Khamenei's status as supreme guide.
Aghajari, apart from the death penalty, was also sentenced in 2002 to eight years in jail. The term was later commuted to four years before being scrapped on April 14, but he is still being held in Tehran's Evin prison.
President Mohammad Khatami, in an open letter carried by the state news agency IRNA, condemned the sentencing of Aghajari.
It is "painful" that an intellectual such as Aghajari who has served the Islamic revolution and who during the war against Iraq in the 1980s lost a leg should be faced with the death sentence, he wrote.