MOSCOW, October 17 (RIA Novosti) - An Iranian court has released on a $300,000 bail a Newsweek journalist with dual Iranian-Canadian citizenship, arrested in the wake of the disputed presidential elections in June, Iranian media said.
Maziar Bahari, 42, who worked as a Newsweek reporter since 1998, was arrested on June 21 during the post-vote protests in Tehran "for his role in instigating events occurred after the presidential election," the Press TV said.
"Bahari was released on 3 billion rials ($300,000) bail from Evin prison on Saturday night," the semi-official Islamic Labor News Agency said citing a judiciary source.
Bahari has admitted to giving "false and biased" reports about the contested June 12 re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, IRNA said.
Newsweek said, however, that the journalist "has been accredited to the magazine in Iran for over a decade, and in that time had established a solid reputation for balanced reporting."
Ahmadinejad's re-election triggered mass protests by supporters of the defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's, in which at least 27 people were killed. About 4,000 people were arrested in Iran's most severe unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, some 300 of them still remain in prison.
