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Iranian Judiciary Says Panahi Must Serve Six-year Sentence

In this file photo taken on August 30, 2010 Iranian film director Jafar Panahi on a balcony overlooking Tehran during an interview with AFP. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on August 30, 2010 Iranian film director Jafar Panahi on a balcony overlooking Tehran during an interview with AFP. (AFP)
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Iranian Judiciary Says Panahi Must Serve Six-year Sentence

In this file photo taken on August 30, 2010 Iranian film director Jafar Panahi on a balcony overlooking Tehran during an interview with AFP. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on August 30, 2010 Iranian film director Jafar Panahi on a balcony overlooking Tehran during an interview with AFP. (AFP)

Award-winning dissident Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, arrested last week in Tehran, must serve a six-year sentence previously handed to him in 2010, the judicial authority announced Tuesday.

Panahi, 62, has won a number of awards at international festivals for films that have critiqued modern Iran, including the top prize in Berlin for "Taxi" in 2015, and best screenplay at Cannes for his film "Three Faces" in 2018.

He is the third director to be detained this month, alongside Mostafa Aleahmad and Mohammad Rasoulof, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2020 with his film "There Is No Evil".

"Panahi had been sentenced in 2010 to a total of six years in prison... and therefore he was entered into Evin detention center to serve his sentence there", judiciary spokesman Massoud Setayeshi told reporters, according to AFP.

He was arrested in 2010, following his support for anti-government demonstrations.

He was convicted of "propaganda against the system", sentenced to six years in jail, banned from directing or writing films and blocked from leaving the country.

But he served only two months in jail in 2010, and was subsequently living on conditional release that could be revoked at any time.

Panahi was arrested again on July 11 after he went to the prosecutor's office to follow up on the situation of Rasoulof.

The arrests come after Panahi and Rasoulof denounced in May the arrests of several colleagues in their homeland in an open letter.

Despite the political pressures, Iran has a thriving film industry and the country's products regularly win awards at major international festivals.

Panahi's detention has sparked condemnation from fellow filmmakers.

Cannes film festival organizers said they "strongly condemn" the arrests as well as "the wave of repression evidently under way in Iran against its artists".

The Venice film festival called for the "immediate release" of the directors, while the Berlin film festival said it was "dismayed and outraged" at the arrest.

France's foreign ministry on Friday expressed concern at the "arbitrary" arrests of the filmmakers, citing a "worrying deterioration in the situation of artists in Iran".

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Black Boxes from India Plane Crash Under Study to Ascertain Cause of the Disaster That Killed 270 

Officials inspect the site of Thursday's Air India plane crash on the roof of a building in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP)
Officials inspect the site of Thursday's Air India plane crash on the roof of a building in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP)
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Black Boxes from India Plane Crash Under Study to Ascertain Cause of the Disaster That Killed 270 

Officials inspect the site of Thursday's Air India plane crash on the roof of a building in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP)
Officials inspect the site of Thursday's Air India plane crash on the roof of a building in Ahmedabad, India, Friday, June 13, 2025. (AP)

Investigators in India are studying the black boxes of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner after recovering them from the aircraft wreckage to ascertain the cause of last week’s plane crash that left at least 270 people dead.

The black boxes will provide cockpit conversations and data related to the plane's engine and control settings to investigators and help them in determining the cause of the crash.

The London-bound Air India aircraft, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, crashed on a medical college hostel soon after taking off from the western city of Ahmedabad. Only one passenger survived the crash, while 241 people on board and 29 on the ground were killed in one of India’s worst aviation disaster in decades.

Experts from India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau are probing the crash with assistance from the UK, the US and officials from Boeing.

Amit Singh, a former pilot and an aviation expert, said the recovery of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, or black boxes, are crucial to piece together the sequence of events.

The cockpit voice recorder records pilots’ conversation, emergency alarms and any distress signal made before a crash. The plane’s digital flight data recorder stores information related to engine and control settings. Both devices are designed to survive a crash.

“The data will reveal everything,” Singh said, adding that the technical details could be corroborated by the cockpit voice recorder that would help investigators know of any communication between air traffic control and the pilots.

India’s aviation regulatory body has said the aircraft made a mayday call before the crash.

Singh said the investigating authorities will scan CCTV footage of the nearby area and speak with witnesses to get to the root cause of the crash.

Additionally, Singh said, the investigators will also study the pilot training records, total load of the aircraft, thrust issues related to the plane's engine, as well as its worthiness in terms of past performances and any previously reported issues.

Aurobindo Handa, former director general of India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, said the investigators across the world follow a standard UN-prescribed Manual of Accident Investigation, also called “DOC 9756,” which outlines detailed procedures to arrive at the most probable cause of a crash.

Handa said the investigation into last week's crash would likely be a long process as the aircraft was badly charred. He added that ascertaining the condition of the black boxes recovered from the crash site was vital as the heat generated from the crash could be possibly higher than the bearable threshold of the device.

The Indian government has set up a separate, high-level committee to examine the causes leading to the crash and formulate procedures to prevent and handle aircraft emergencies in the future. The committee is expected to file a preliminary report within three months.

Authorities have also begun inspecting and carrying out additional maintenance and checks of Air India’s entire fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliners to prevent any future incident. Air India has 33 Dreamliners in its fleet.

The plane that crashed was 12 years old. Boeing planes have been plagued by safety issues on other types of aircraft. There are currently around 1,200 of the 787 Dreamliner aircraft worldwide and this was the first deadly crash in 16 years of operation, according to experts.