Nobel Laureate Assigned Bodyguards

Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi has been assigned personal security following 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 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.

Iranian police have responded by assigning bodyguards to Ebadi, according to Dadkhah. 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 Ebadi's life was in danger, he said.

Police officials were not immediately available for comment.

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

Ebadi, 56, is hailed by reformers as a new beacon for their embattled effort to weaken the clerics' monopoly on power.

"The award put a heavy burden on my shoulders," she said after winning the prize. "I will not reduce my activities, I will increase them."

Her supporters hope Ebadi could use her international stature to force concessions from the regime. But Ebadi said she has no plans to stand in elections.

"I will never seek political power. A human rights activist should be among the people and speak for the silent population," Ebadi said.

While reformists 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." Friday prayer leader 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."

In her first press conference in Iran as a Nobel laureate, Ebadi last month demanded Iranian leaders free all political prisoners, including journalists and activists jailed for allegedly insulting the hard-line authorities. She said last week there has been no response from the leadership.

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. Possible 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 Khameneni's representative."

University officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Ebadi was Iran's first female judge, but lost her post in the 1979 Islamic Revolution when the clerics barred women from the bench.

As a lawyer, she has represented the families of writers and intellectuals killed in 1999, and worked to expose conspirators behind an attack by pro-clergy assailants on students at Tehran University the same year.

The Nobel peace prize committee often awards prizes in the hopes of encouraging a laureate's work. In its announcement of the prize to Ebadi, the committee said, "We hope that the people of Iran will feel joyous that for the first time in history one of their citizens has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and we hope the Prize will be an inspiration for all those who struggle for human rights and democracy in her country, in the Moslem world, and in all countries where the fight for human rights needs inspiration and support."