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Two brothers who were arrested at a Christmas gathering over three years ago have both been sentenced to four years in prison, fined, and exiled from their home province for two years after their release.
Christian converts Mahmoud Mardani-Kharaji, 56, and his brother Mansour, who will turn 50 in April, were convicted under the amended Article 500 of the penal code, which criminalises “deviant propaganda activities contrary to the holy religion of Islam”.
On top of the prison sentences, the brothers were fined 150 million tomans each (around $1,500), banned from membership of any groups for five years after their release, and told they must spend the first two of those years outside the bounds of their home province of Isfahan.
Two other Christians who were arrested alongside the brothers and who cannot be named were also present at the trial in January and previous court hearing in November 2024, but the charges against them were dropped.
The reason the charges were dropped remains unclear, but Christian converts are routinely pressured to recant their faith or sign commitments to refrain from any further involvement in Christian activities.
It has been three years since Article18 first reported on the brothers’ arrest, after which they remained missing for over a month.
Their arrest was carried out by plainclothes intelligence agents, who showed no warrant nor explained which security force they represented, when they raided the gathering on 22 December 2021 in Fooladshahr, a small city just outside Isfahan.
Iranian Christian website Mohabat News, which first reported the arrest, explained to Article18 at the time that the brothers’ family members, not knowing which agency had been responsible for the arrest, had been threatened and mocked by the officials they had spoken to, as they anxiously sought information about them.
