Blasphemy student's life spared but he gets 20 years

Published on Tuesday 21 October 2008 23:08

AN AFGHAN appeal court yesterday overturned a death sentence for a journalism student accused of blasphemy and instead sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

A three-judge panel jailed 24-year-old Parwez Kambakhsh after a day of arguments between the student's defence lawyer and state witnesses.

Kambakhsh was studying journalism at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and writing for a local newspaper when he was arrested in October 2007.

Prosecutors alleged that Kambakhsh disrupted classes by asking questions about women's rights under Islam. They also said he illegally distributed an article he printed off the internet that asks why Islam does not modernise to give women equal rights. He also allegedly scribbled his own comments on the paper.

A lower court sentenced him to death in a trial critics have called flawed in part because Kambakhsh had no lawyer representing him.

The head of Tuesday's panel, Abdul Salaam Qazizada, struck down the lower court's death penalty but said the decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court.

"I don't accept the court's decision," Kambakhsh said as he was leaving the court. "It is an unfair decision."

Yesterday, five witnesses from Mazar-i-Sharif – two students and three teachers – appeared before the judges.

The first witness, a student named Hamid who gave only one name, told the court he had been forced into making a statement accusing Kambakhsh of blasphemy by members of Afghanistan's intelligence service and a professor who threatened him with expulsion.

Other witnesses testified that Kambakhsh had violated tenets of Islam.

After Kambakhsh was sentenced to death in January, Muslim clerics welcomed the lower court's decision and public demonstrations were held against the student.