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Journalist Banned From Returning To Iran After "Illegal" Reporting
TEHRAN, Feb 4 (News Agencies) - Iran said Sunday that U.S. journalist, Jonathan Lyons, who left the country last week in the face of a possible lawsuit from an imprisoned Iranian journalist, was banned from returning.
The Tehran bureau chief for Reuters news agency left overnight Friday with his wife Geneive Abdo, a reporter for several Western newspapers, amid a brewing scandal over a prison interview with journalist Akbar Ganji.
The culture ministry, which supervises press affairs, said in a statement published by the official IRNA news agency that Lyons had not been expelled but that his "illegal" actions made him ineligible for return.
"No steps were taken to expel these two journalists," ministry official Mohammad-Reza Khoshvaght said in the statement.
But he said the ministry sent Reuters officials a letter explaining that the actions of Lyons and Abdo were "illegal and contrary to the code of conduct applicable to journalists in Iran."
He said Ganji had informed the ministry of his intention to file a lawsuit over quotes attributed to him that were published both by Reuters and the British daily The Guardian, for which Abdo is a correspondent.
Ganji's family had earlier protested about alleged inaccuracies in the reports, especially the claim that Ganji had advocated the use of violence to defend Iran's reform movement.
Ganji was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison and a further five in internal exile for, among other charges, having accused top government officials of ordering the killings of leading dissidents.
The interview was reportedly conducted via written questions that were smuggled in and out of Ganji's prison cell.
Khoshvaght stressed that Iran would still welcome a replacement for Lyons as the British agency's bureau chief.
Barry Moody, Middle East and African editor for Reuters, said that Lyons had not been expelled and that he had been due anyway to finish his tenure in Tehran at the end of the month.
"We asked him to come talk to us about the situation. He is talking to us [in London]," Moody said, adding the company was preparing a statement.
Abdo was a Tehran correspondent for several publications, including The Guardian's sister Sunday paper The Observer, as well as the International Herald Tribune, and was formerly a writer for English weekly The Economist.
Reuters closed its Tehran bureau in the 1980s but reopened it in 1998 with Lyons as bureau chief.
Among the world's major news agencies, only Agence France-Presse still has a foreign bureau chief in Tehran. An Iranian national heads the bureau of the U.S. agency, Associated Press.
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