Jamshid Jabbari was a member of the Narenji website who was arrested on December 3, 2013 by the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Kerman. Those arrested were charged by the judicial authorities with “security” related crimes and with communicating with “foreign” and “counter-revolutionary” networks.

News sources reported in December 2013 that Jabbari had been arrested because he had published material critical of the state, communicated with domestic Iranian Christian churches and that he had promoted Christianity.

Jabbari and his colleagues from the Narenji website were tried before Branch 6 of the Prosecutor’s Office of Kerman. They were accused of “establishing communications with members of media networks opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” “designing and updating educational websites for citizen journalists at the instruction of western news networks and receiving funding from these networks,” “taking instructions from counter-revolutionary dissidents and designing websites that are against the principles of Islamic Republic of Iran and sites that are related to the [2009 presidential election protests].”

Given that Jabbari had not worked directly on managing Narenji, he was released on bail and later sentenced to one and a half years in prison by Branch 6 of the Prosecutor’s Office of Kerman, which was suspended for three years.

Narenji was a Persian language news and analysis site that was founded in 2007. According to the founders, Narenji was initially created to familiarize people with new technology in their daily lives. In 2010, it won the most informative website in the third Online Festival of Iranian Websites and in 2012 it was awarded the best Persian blog by Deutsche Welle.

On February 7, 2014, three months after the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Narenji shared the first Persian translation of Steve Jobs’s biography (written by Walter Isaacson). Narenji made all 523 pages of the biography, translated into Persian by Nasser Dadgostar, available for its users to download for free.

Prior to this, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which aims to protect civil rights in the online and digital world, published a report on its website which demanded the release of the writers, managers and members of the Narenji website.