Iran newspaper chief freed after arrest

The head of Iran’s reformist newspaper Shargh is freed Sunday, a day after being arrested over a report on “prostitution” in a northeastern city that angered residents, Iranian media says.

Mehdi Rahmanian, the director of the newspaper, is released in the afternoon after paying bail of 500 million rials ($9,000 dollars), the ILNA news agency reports.

The courts had summoned him “after a complaint by a group of residents of the Shahid Rajai neighbourhood of Mashhad,” the semi-official ISNA news agency reports, quoting the city’s deputy prosecutor Hassan Heydari.

“The newspaper had described some of the district’s women as prostitutes.”

Mashhad’s Khorassan newspaper says Rahmanian had been detained after initially failing to pay the bail.

— AFP