The Iranian Supreme Court commuted the death sentences...

The Iranian Supreme Court commuted the death sentences of at least two former secret agents found guilty of the murders of four dissidents in 1998.
Mostafa Kazemi and Mehrdad Alikhani - both former senior intelligence officials - were instead sentenced to life in prison for ordering the murders of Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar, Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh.
It was unclear whether a third man's death sentence had been commuted.
Two agents accused of carrying out the actual murders were sentenced to 10 years each in prison.
Seven others were given prison terms from two-and-a-half to 10 years for their roles in the murders, with four or five more apparently acquitted, the Associated Press news agency reported.
All had originally been found guilty by an Iranian military court in 2001 - in a trial that was dismissed as a sham by the victims' families and international human rights organisations.
However in August 2002 the Supreme Court quashed some of the verdicts and remanded the case to the military court that handed down the original verdicts, ordering a retrial after five interrogators at the military court were arrested for torturing the agents during questioning
According to the final ruling by the Supreme Court, the two former intelligence ministry directors, Kazemi and Alikhani, were given four life terms each for ordering the murders.
The victims, Dariush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh, had run a small political opposition party when they were found stabbed to death 22 November 1998.
Writers Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh and Mohammad Mokhtari were kidnapped weeks later.
Their bodies were eventually found on the outskirts of the capital, Tehran. They had apparently been strangled.
The murders of the four dissident writers and intellectuals were widely blamed on rogue elements from within the Iranian Information Ministry keen to destabilise Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's reformist regime.
But they also highlighted the continuing struggle between Khatami and Iranian hardliners, who control the judiciary and who reformists accuse of ultimately ordering the murders.
Many, including the families of those killed, suspected that those convicted of the killings were merely scapegoats acting on orders from high within the ministry.
Iran's hardliners in turn accused foreign powers, including Israel, of committing the crimes.
But the revelation in 1999 that intelligence officials had been involved in the murders caused a huge scandal and led to a ministerial resignation.