IRANIAN Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who was originally sentenced to death in his native country for his Christian faith, was acquitted of apostasy charges and released from custody.
Nadarkhani, 32, was imprisoned for three years and waiting execution for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. His charges were lowered to evangelizing to Muslims, which carried a three-year sentence. He was released with time served, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based watchdog group that had been campaigning for the pastor’s release.
“Today our sources in Iran reported that Pastor Youcef was acquitted of apostasy and released from prison. After languishing in prison for almost three years, he has been reunited with his family,” Jordan Sekulow, executive director of ACLJ said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
Nadarkhani was arrested in October 2010 and imprisoned in his city of residence charged with the crime of apostasy and deviating from Islam.
An Islamic court in a small city in the North of Iran issued the execution order for Yousef Nadarkhani because of Apostasy in the beginning of 2011.
This verdict was objected to by his lawyer, who made a presentation based on current contradictions in the law and appealed to reverse the verdict. This appeal brought Nadarkhani’s case to the revision court.
At the end of last summer of 2011, Mr Dadkhah, the lawyer of the accused, announced to the public media that he is still waiting for the vote of the Supreme Court of the country annulling or reinforcing the ruling.
Earlier, Nadarkhani’s lawyer had reported that his client’s case had been forwarded to Ayatollah Khamenei for consideration.
The 35-year-old prisoner and father of two converted to Christianity at the age of 19 and, at the time of his arrest, he was leading a small non-trinitarian Christian congregation in Rasht at what was called the “Church of Iranians”.
