Watchdog

A court in Almaty has found the independent weekly "Alma-Ata Info" guilty of libel and ordered it to pay damages and print an apology to a local businessman, RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports.

The damages award of around $1,000 by the Medeu district court should be paid by journalist Askhat Bimenbetov and the paper.

It is far below the roughly $667,000 demanded by Valeriy Alefirenko, whom the court concluded was defamed in an article that appeared in "Alma-Ata Info" in September.

Alefirenko's lawyer, Petr Kotlyakov, said his client was not satisfied with the amount of the judgment and would therefore appeal.

The libel verdict adds to the woes of "Alma-Ata Info," which is already under a court-ordered suspension over its disclosure of state secrets. Owner and editor Ramazan Esergepov has been in jail since January over the same article, which was published in November.

An Iranian blogger, Omidreza Mirsayafi, has died in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.

His sister told RFE/RL's Radio Farda that the death of her 28-year-old brother came under suspicious circumstances.

The media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it was "deeply shocked" by the news and called for an investigation into the details of the tragedy.

According to RSF, Mirsayafi's lawyer, Mohamed Ali Dadkhah, was told of his client's death by a doctor, Hesem Firozi, who is himself in prison.

Mirsayafi mostly blogged about traditional Persian music and culture, not politics.

He had been summoned to Tehran's Revolutionary Court for interrogation on February 7.

At the end of the questioning, he was placed in detention.

"The death of this young blogger is entirely due to a failure to provide assistance,” Firozi said.

He said Mirsayafi had been despondent at the refusal of prison authorities to allow him to leave prison.

"I am worried," Mirsayafi told RSF in a recent e-mail. "The problem is not my sentence of two years in prison. But I am a sensitive person. I will not have the energy to live in prison. I want everything to be like it was before. I want to resume my normal life and continue my studies.”

Mirsayafi was first arrested in April 2008. He was released after 41 days in custody on payment of bail of some 72,000 euros.

He was tried in November under articles of Iran's Criminal Code dealing with insults against the country's leaders.

"I am a cultural and not a political blogger," he told RSF after his conviction. "Of all the articles I have posted online, only two or three were satirical. I did not mean to insult anyone."