Prominent Iranian Cartoonist Reported Arrested in Tehran
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Version 0 of 1. A prominent press cartoonist in Iran was arrested at work on Monday by security agents who provided no explanation, according to an Iranian news website and rights activists. The cartoonist, Hadi Heidari, appeared to be the latest in Iran’s literary world to have run afoul of conservatives suspicious of interactions with the West. The Tabnak news site, a Persian-language service in Iran, said Mr. Heidari was taken into custody for “unknown reasons” Monday afternoon while at work at The Shahrvand, a daily newspaper in Tehran that is owned by Iran’s Red Crescent Society, or Red Cross. Iranian rights activists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for protection, said they had learned of Mr. Heidari’s arrest from his colleagues at The Shahrvand, who described the arresting agents as members of the intelligence unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The arrest had not been reported in the official news media as of Monday night. It came after the publication of a cartoon by Mr. Heidari depicting tearful solidarity with the people of France over the attacks Friday that left at least 129 people dead. The Islamic State has asserted responsibility for the attacks. Mr. Heidari, whose drawings are well known, also posted the cartoon on Instagram. Iran’s hard-line conservatives, who control the state news media, police and judiciary, have denounced the killings, and like most of the rest of the world consider the Islamic State a terrorist group. At the same time, they are wary of any perceived expression of friendly overtures to secular Western countries, which they might have thought the cartoon conveyed. Mr. Heidari has faced trouble before. He was jailed for a few weeks in 2009, when political turmoil was convulsing Iran over a disputed presidential election, for having participated in a religious ceremony to free political prisoners. He also was summoned for questioning in 2012 for a cartoon that conservative critics said had insulted Iranian soldiers by depicted them as entering the eight-year-long war with Iraq wearing blindfolds. Shargh, a reformist-minded newspaper that published that cartoon, was ordered closed. Mr. Heidari’s latest arrest occurred in the midst of a new crackdown, partly inspired by warnings from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, against Western infiltration of Iran’s economic, culture and politics in the aftermath of the nuclear agreement signed in July with major foreign powers. A number of Iranian journalists have been arrested in the last few weeks, accused of collaborating with the United States and its allies. Last month, two prominent Iranian poets were sentenced to long prison terms for work deemed to be insulting and subversive. Their punishment included flogging for having once shaken hands with an unrelated member of the opposite sex at a poetry festival in Sweden. |