Suspects in Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas plane hijacking "amnestied" after 20 years in prison
On Monday, April 29, Iranian media reported the pardon of four defendants in the Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas hijacking case after 20 years in prison.
According to ISNA news agency, these individuals have been "pardoned" on the occasion of the mid-Sha'ban holiday, at the suggestion of cinema director Ebrahim Hatamikia and with the approval of the head of the judiciary.
Khaled Hardani, Rasoul Hardani, Farhang Pourmansouri, and Shahram Pourmansouri were the main perpetrators of the hijacking. They were initially sentenced to death, but their sentences were eventually changed to life imprisonment.
Ebrahim Hatamikia has proposed to the judiciary to release these individuals because he made the movie "Low Height" based on this incident.
On April 21, 2020, he proposed pardoning these four convicts in a letter to Ebrahim Raisi.
Khaled Hardani, the prime suspect in the hijacking, was sentenced to death in 2000 on charges of acting against national security and disrupting flight safety.
However, the execution of his death sentence was halted by Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the then head of the judiciary, and after this incident, all the defendants in the hijacking requested clemency from the judiciary.
As reported by ISNA News Agency on November 27, 2007, the Judiciary's Amnesty Commission after some time reduced the death sentence of Khaled Hardani to 20 years in prison and the sentences of the other two defendants, brothers Shahram and Farhang Pourmansouri, from life imprisonment to 15 years in prison.
It seems that the Iranian judiciary has set the date of commencement of the execution of the defendants' 20 and 15-year prison sentences as 2007 and has not taken into account the previous imprisonment. Thus, the four defendants had already served 14 years of this sentence.
On December 13, 2010, the Hardani family attempted to hijack an Ahvaz-Bandar Abbas plane en route to the United States, but after a clash with the flight crew, they failed to hijack the plane and were arrested.
23 of the passengers on this flight were members of the same family, and after being arrested, they stated that the real reason for their action was "poverty and economic pressure."
The public prosecutor's representative in the court hearings described the hijackers' actions in this incident as "non-political" and said that intelligence ministry agents had also confirmed their actions were due to "economic problems."
Shahram Pourmansouri, one of the defendants in the kidnapping, said in court that he "did not know" about the hijacking and that "an hour before boarding the plane, I took this weapon and put it inside my shoe to take it onto the plane because of a confrontation with Khaled {Hardani}, who is our son-in-law."
Rasoul Hardani, who was under 18 years old at the time of the hijacking, had previously said in an interview with Mehr News Agency that he had married in Evin Prison after 15 years of imprisonment.
In the film "Low Height", Hamid Farrokhnejad and Leila Hatami played the two main roles. The film, which was released in 2002, won numerous film awards.
Source: Radio Farda
