A former prosecutor general of Tehran Saeed Mortazavi has been sentenced to 135 lashes for financial corruption.
Mortazavi, 49, was found guilty of “seizing and wasting public funds” while he ran Iran’s social welfare organisation under the then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his close ally.
On Wednesday, the state-run news website Irib quoted a lawyer as saying Mortazavi had been given 70 lashes for seizing public funds and another 65 lashes for showing negligence in his job and wasting public money. The sentencing has not yet been confirmed by judicial authorities.
Mortazavi, who was prosecutor general of Tehran from 2003 to 2009, fell from grace because of his links to the deaths in custody of at least three protesters after the disputed 2009 presidential election that gave Ahmadinejad a second term as president, the Guardian reports.
