Death sentence for Afghan reporter

A student journalist sentenced to death in northern Afghanistan for allegedly blaspheming Islam may actually be paying the price for investigative pieces that his brother wrote, an international media group said Wednesday.

Those articles exposed human rights abuses by political and paramilitary factions in northern Afghanistan, said the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

"(The brother) feels very strongly that it's a campaign of intimidation against him and others like him who might want to take on these powerful commanders," Jean Mackenzie, country director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, told CNN.

The international organization trains journalists Afghanistan and other conflict zones.

A lower court in Mazar-e-Sharif on Tuesday sentenced Sayed Perwiz Kaambaksh, 23, to death Tuesday, after it tried him behind closed doors and without representation, MacKenzie said.

Prosecutors accused Kaambaksh of anti-Islam propaganda, contending that the third-year journalism student downloaded a document from the Internet last October that criticized Islam's position on women.

But Kaambaksh claims someone else put his name on the document, and then distributed it to students at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif where he is a student.

"He denies he had anything to do with this publication," MacKenzie said.

The Institute and other media groups in the country now believe Kaambaksh was actually arrested for articles his brother wrote criticizing provincial authorities.

The brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, is one of the leading independent journalists in the region and has written numerous stories that detail human rights abuses, MacKenzie said.

Among his best-known pieces was an expose of the "dancing boys," teenage boys who dress up as girls and dance for male patrons at parties thrown by some commanders in northern Afghanistan.

In other reports, Ibrahimi has named government officials who extort money from locals, MacKenzie said.

The day after Kaambaksh was arrested, authorities paid Ibrahimi a visit and combed through his computer and notebooks looking for names of sources who helped him in his reporting, MacKenzie said.

"This is why we think this is tied to (Ibrahimi)," she said.

Various media organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, have appealed to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to intervene -- but so far he has been silent, MacKenzie said.

The case now winds through two higher courts.

"(Ibrahimi) is a very brave reporter and I've never known him to falter," MacKenzie said. "But having his brother sentenced to death has made him very, very anxious."

Source: CNN.com