[custom_adv] Mohammad Ali Zam was born in 1955 in Tehran. He appeared “Democracy in Day Light” directed by Ali Atashani. On Saturday executed an exiled journalist over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017, a little more than a year after authorities tricked him into traveling to Iraq where he was abducted. [custom_adv] Ruhollah Zam, 47, was one of several opposition figures successfully seized by intelligence operatives abroad in recent months as Tehran struggles under the weight of U.S. sanctions. [custom_adv] Kidnapping and executing Zam, who lived in Paris under what described as French government protection, likely will further chill an already-scattered opposition across the West. It also comes as tries to pressure France and other European nations over the collapsed atomic accord in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration. [custom_adv] Zam’s “execution is a deadly blow to freedom of expression and shows the extent of the Iranian authorities’ brutal tactics to instill fear and deter dissent,” warned Diana Eltahawy of Amnesty International. [custom_adv] Zam’s website AmadNews and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the 2017 protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran’s Shiite theocracy. [custom_adv] Those demonstrations, which began at the end of December 2017 and continued into 2018, represented the biggest challenge to rulers since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar mass unrest in November of last year. [custom_adv] The initial spark for the 2017 protests was a sudden jump in food prices. Many believe that hard-line opponents of President Hassan Rouhani instigated the first demonstrations in the conservative city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, trying to direct public anger at the president. But as protests spread from town to town, the backlash turned against the entire ruling class. [custom_adv] Telegram shut down the channel over government complaints it spread information about how to make gasoline bombs. The channel later continued under a different name. Zam denied inciting violence on Telegram at the time. [custom_adv] Zam himself had fled after the 2009 protests, heading first to Malaysia and then to France. While Iranian authorities have never described how Revolutionary Guard detained him, Amnesty said he was seized on a trip to neighboring Iraq — where the Guard has wielded deep influence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. [custom_adv] Zam’s father, the reformist Shiite cleric Mohammad Ali Zam, seemed to confirm the Iraqi abduction in comments on Instagram on Saturday. The cleric said he only was allowed to visit Tehran’s Evin prison on Friday to see his son after agreeing with authorities not to tell him his execution loomed. [custom_adv] France previously has criticized his death sentence as “a serious blow to freedom of expression and press freedom.” Reporters Without Borders, a group that campaigns for press freedoms, said Zam’s hanging was a “new crime of justice.”
