Iran gives Nobel Prize laureate protection

TEHRAN, Iran - Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has been given bodyguards by police after a number of death threats since she returned to Iran last month, a close associate said Wednesday.

Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, spokesman for the Center for Protecting Human Rights, said Ebadi has received one or two threatening letters a day since a week after the Nobel was announced Oct. 10.

Dadkhah said one of the letters depicted a knife and another threatened, "You will be punished for this prize."

Dadkhah said that it was not clear who was sending the death threats but that it appeared to be a warning by extremist groups. He didn't elaborate.

Police have responded by assigning bodyguards to Ebadi, Dadkhah said. Police have also given her a police car with a driver. The protection was provided after the center, co-founded by Ebadi, wrote to Iran's Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari warning that her life was in danger, he said.

Police officials were not immediately available for comment.

Ebadi, a human rights and pro-democracy lawyer, won the Nobel for efforts that included promoting the cause of women and children in Iran and worldwide. She is the first Iranian and Muslim woman to win the award.

While reformers hailed Ebadi's victory as a "source of pride for Iran and a boost to democratic reforms," hard-liners denounced her as a "Western mercenary."

Gholamreza Hasani, who represents Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in northwestern Iran, has described Ebadi as a "mentally retarded woman with secular thinking."

After a daring speech last week at Amir Kabir University where Ebadi praised modern and ancient enemies of the Islamic hard-liners who rule Iran, she made a small but telling gesture: shaking hands with two men, Habibollah Peyman and Mohammad Maleki, both prominent dissidents. Under Iran's Islamic-inspired laws, it is a crime for men and women who are not related to shake hands in public. Punishments range from jail to flogging.

On Wednesday, Sajjad Qoroqi, a reformist student leader who helped organize the speech, said authorities have since banned Ebadi, Peyman and Maleki from addressing students at that university for a year "under pressure from Khamenei's representative."

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