03 February 2020 :

The Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor of Tabas in eastern Iran said Saturday, February 1 that a tourist was lashed 80 times for drinking alcohol on a tour. Amir Zare Hosseini who was cited by the state-run Tasnim news agency said the whole “legal procedure” and sentence implementation was carried out in less than five hours. The Tabas prosecutor claimed that the sentence had not been appealed and was carried out because the person had not objected to the verdict in the initial court. “In the existing videos, a person was drinking alcohol and after legal procedures were carried out, the verdict was issued and since the defendant did not protest, the sentence was carried out,” Hosseini said. He said that more than one and half liters of alcohol was found in the bus carrying the tourists. “According to article 264 and 265 in the Islamic Penal Code, (drinking alcohol) is punishable by 80 lashes, which was carried out today in this case,” Amir Zare Hosseini added without elaborating the case. “On Friday January 31, a number of people drank alcohol on a tour in Tabas,” he said adding that they had “confessed” to their “crime”. The cleric, stressed that while tourism was good for the economy, tourists “had to follow the laws of the Islamic Republic including the hijab and Islamic culture and refrain from breaking the norms.”