A journalism student at Afghanistan’s Balkh University who was sentenced to death this year for offending Islam has been granted an appeal, Bloomberg News reports. The student, Sayad Parwez Kambakhsh, was recently transferred to a prison in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the Afghanistan program director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting told Bloomberg that the move “was accompanied by promises from officials in the government of President Hamid Karzai that Kambakhsh would be freed.”
President Karzai indicated in February that the death sentence against Mr. Kambaksh was not likely to be carried out, but he has refrained from weighing in more directly in the case and pardoning the student, as a growing chorus of international voices has urged him to do. —Aisha Labi
