Tehran - The Iranian judiciary has closed down the news website Baztab which is critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration, ISNA news agency reported Sunday. Baztab manager Mohammad-Javad Barbarian told ISNA that the prosecutor office sealed the Baztab office last Wednesday upon a request by the Ahmadinejad government which had argued that a legally filtered website should not be allowed to work.
Barbarian had hoped that the dispute would be settled following the Persian weekend (Thursday and Friday), but after the judiciary refused to revise its decision, Baztab eventually went public and announced the closure.
The government had since April this year filtered Baztab, but the site could maintain its readers abroad, and even inside the country many users broke the filtering by anti-proxy programmes.
Baztab is said to be actually run by Mohsen Rezaie, former commander of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards and spokesman of the Expediency Council, a body meddling in legislative disputes and chaired by ex-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who currently leads the opposition to Ahmadinejad.
