Hijackers of Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas Flight «Pardoned» After 20 Years in Prison
Iranian media reported on Monday, April 9, that four defendants in the Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas flight hijacking case were pardoned after 20 years of imprisonment.
According to ISNA news agency, these individuals were pardoned on the proposal of filmmaker Ibrahim Hatami Kia and with the approval of the head of the judiciary on the occasion of the fifteenth of Shaaban.
Khaled Hardani, Rasool Hardani, Farhang Pourmansouri, and Shahram Pourmansouri were the main perpetrators of this hijacking, who were initially sentenced to death, but their sentences were ultimately commuted to life imprisonment.
Ibrahim Hatami Kia proposed the release of these individuals to the judiciary because, based on this incident, he made the film “Altitude of Poverty.”
On April 20, 1399, he had submitted a letter to Ibrahim Raisi proposing the pardon of these four convicts.
Khaled Hardani, the first defendant in this hijacking, was sentenced to death in 2000 on charges of acting against national security and disrupting flight safety.
However, the execution of his sentence was halted by Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, then head of the judiciary, and after this incident, all defendants in this hijacking requested clemency from the judiciary.
As ISNA news agency reported on October 29, 2007, the judiciary’s pardon and clemency commission, after a period of time, reduced Khaled Hardani’s death sentence to 20 years in prison and reduced the sentences of two other defendants, who were brothers Shahram and Farhang Pourmansouri, from life imprisonment to 15 years in prison.
It appears that the Iranian judiciary considered the year 2007 as the start of the execution of the 20 and 15-year prison sentences of the defendants and did not take into account previous imprisonment. Therefore, these four defendants had endured 14 years of this sentence so far.
The Hardani family attempted on December 14, 2000, to hijack the Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas flight mid-route to the United States, but after a confrontation with the flight crew, they failed to hijack the aircraft and were arrested.
23 passengers on this flight were members of one family, and after their arrest, they stated the real reason for their action was “poverty and economic pressure.”
The prosecutor’s representative in court sessions described the hijackers’ action in this incident as “non-political” and said that Ministry of Intelligence officers also confirmed their action was due to “economic problems.”
Shahram Pourmansouri, one of the defendants in this kidnapping, stated in court that he “had no knowledge of the hijacking” and “an hour before boarding the plane due to a quarrel with Khaled {Hardani}, who is our son-in-law, I took this weapon and by concealing it inside my shoe, I brought it into the plane.”
Rasool Hardani, who was less than 18 years old at the time of the hijacking, previously stated in an interview with Mehr news agency that after 15 years in prison, he got married in Evin prison.
In the film “Altitude of Poverty,” Hamid Farrokhnejad and Leila Hatami played the two main roles. This film, which was released in 2002, won numerous cinema awards.
Source: Radio Farda
