10-year jail-term for student Omid Kokabee upheld by appeal court

GVF — An appeal court has upheld a ten-year prison term for Iranian physics student Omid Kokabee, opposition website Jaras has reported.

According to the site, Kokabee’s lawyers have yet to meet with him and there’s been a continuous disregard for the rule of law and the lack of due process in the young student’s case

Kokabee, a Iranian Turkmen who previously worked on the physics of optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain, and more recently at the University of Texas in Austin, was arrested while returning to Iran in February 2011 on charges of “communicating with a hostile government” and “illegitimate earnings.”

In May 2012, Judge Abolghasem Salavati of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolution Court, notorious for his harsh sentences against countless dissidents, tried Kokabee along with twelve others, under the collective charge of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

The sentence, which has now been approved by Branch 26 of the appeal court, prompted Kokabee’s lawyer Saeed Khalili to dismiss the charges as “irrational and baseless.”