Iran allows banned paper to publish again

Culture minister Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi told state television that the Iran newspaper could now appear again, without giving a precise date.

Gholamhossein Eslami-Far, the director of the paper, was acquitted by the tribunal.

The daily was banned in May and two of its journalists arrested for publishing a cartoon that provoked rioting by Iran's large Azeri community.

A cartoon in the newspaper had depicted an ethnic Azeri as a cockroach, sparking days of clashes between police and thousands of people in the northwest of Iran that left four people dead.

Ethnic Azeris, concentrated in northwestern Iran, account for some 25 percent of the population and are far more numerous in the Islamic republic than in the neighboring former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

Between 2000 and 2004, Iran's hardline judiciary shut down a large number of mostly reformist newspapers and magazines and put scores of journalists in jail, Middle East Times reports.