BAGHDAD — An Iraqi activist has been sentenced to
three years in prison over a disputed tweet deemed insulting to a pro-Iran
paramilitary force, court documents seen by AFP Wednesday showed.
اضافة اعلان
Two protesters in Iraq’s southern city of Nasiriyah were
shot dead in clashes with security forces at a rally against an activist’s
prison sentence, a health official told AFP.
“Two protesters were shot dead” in the clashes and 21 others
were wounded, including five by gunfire, said Hussein Riyad, a spokesman for
the Dhi Qar provincial health ministry.
Haidar Al-Zaidi, 20, had written on Facebook Sunday that he
faced charges of “insulting state institutions”.
On Monday, the court delivered its verdict, which Zaidi can
appeal.
Zaidi was prosecuted over a post, long since deleted from
his Twitter account, criticizing the slain deputy commander of the paramilitary
Hashed Al-Shaabi force, Abu Mahdi Al-Mohandis. Screen grabs of the disputed
tweet were shared by accounts close to the Hashed.
Mohandis was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in
January 2020 alongside Iranian foreign operations commander Gen. Qassem
Suleimani.
He is revered as a martyr by the Hashed, a paramilitary
group integrated into Iraq’s security forces whose political wing forms part of
Iraq’s ruling coalition.
The court granted the Hashed permission to seek financial
damages from Zaidi for the alleged insult.
Zaidi has denied he posted the tweet, claiming his account
was hacked, according to the New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW).
“Regardless of who posted the Twitter message, the Iraqi
justice system should not be used as a tool to suppress peaceful criticism of
the authorities or armed actors,” said HRW’s deputy Middle East director, Adam
Coogle.
Iraq was hit by a wave of protests in late 2019 that were
crushed by the security forces in a bloody crackdown that killed more than 600
people.
In June, the UN mission in Iraq spoke of an “environment of
fear and intimidation” created by assaults and bombings carried out by
unidentified armed elements and “aimed at suppressing dissent and criticism”.
On social media, users contrasted the three-year jail term
handed down against Zaidi with the recent release on bail of businessman Nour
Zuhair Jassem, who is accused of fraudulently withdrawing a significant part of
$2.5 billion in public funds that were stolen from a government account.
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