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IRAN: Stopped at the airport in Iran

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Khalil Bahramian, one of the four Iranian human rights lawyers recently profiled in a Times feature, has been barred from leaving Iran.

Bahramian, 68, said he was due to leave Iran for Italy to receive a journalism prize on behalf of one of his clients, Khalil — or Hiwa — Boutimar, an Iranian Kurd who has been convicted of state security crimes and sentenced to death. His sentenced has been appealed.

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Bahramian went to the airport on Nov. 28. “I got my boarding pass,” he told The Times. “While I was getting some fruit juice before boarding the Turkish Airways flight, a young man came to me and asked me politely, ‘Are you Mr. Bahramian?’”

He told the young man he was.

“He asked me to give him my passport and told me to go the Revolutionary Court to collect my passport,” he said.

Iran’s small cadre of human rights lawyers are often subject to harassment and imprisonment for taking up tough cases of dissidents and journalists charged with political crimes.

— Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

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