TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's Revolutionary Court has given heavy sentences, including the death penalty, to some 30 members of a group of Shi'ite Muslim activists charged with subversion, the Tosea daily said on Sunday.
Members of the Mahdaviat messianic group were charged with the 1999 attempted assassination of a senior judge and the theft of dozens of firearms from the Basij militia.
Former Tehran justice chief, the hardline cleric Ali Razini, was wounded when attackers on a motorcycle attached a bomb to his official car. The Mahdaviat group has also been linked to plots against Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The reformist daily Tosea said 20 hearings were held behind closed doors in the Revolutionary Court, but did not say how many defendants had been sentenced to death or how long the prison sentences were.
Mahdaviat, led by the grandson of a prominent scholar and cleric who died before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, takes its name from the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, who Shi'ites believe will return one day to usher in an era of justice.
Security officials have said Mahdaviat, numbering between 30 and 34 members, sought to eliminate anyone they saw as an obstacle to the return of the Mahdi, who went into hiding in the year 874.
The group, analysts say, is on the extremist fringe of traditionalist Shi'ite opposition to clerical rule in the Islamic Republic, and argues that religion has been polluted by direct involvement in politics.
03:09 05-13-01
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.