A journalism student at Afghanistan’s Balkh University was sentenced to death Jan. 22 for distributing an article taken from the Internet that a religious court found to be degrading to Islam, the Associated Press reported.
Sayad Parwez Kambaksh, 23, distributed but allegedly did not author the information that condemned verses in the Quran about women.
Kambaksh was arrested after some students reported that the article’s content was offensive. Now, several groups, including Afghanistan’s National Journalists’ Union and the president of the Parliament of the 27-nation European Union, are asking Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, to pardon Kambaksh, saying that the article’s content was attempting to improve the status of women in Afghanistan.
