Creators of an Iranian series convicted due to a child's suicide

The creators of the series "Five Kilometers to Heaven" have been sentenced by a court to pay compensation for the death of a child who hanged himself imitating one of the characters in the series. According to a report on Friday, April 6, by Borna News Agency, Ali-Asghar Pourmohammadi, the head of Channel Three, Davood Hashemi, the producer, and Alireza Afkhami, the writer and director of "Five Kilometers to Heaven," were ordered to pay compensation to the family of the child. This series aired during Ramadan in 2011 on Channel Three of Iranian television, and its main theme revolves around a young man who becomes unconscious due to an incident, and his spirit gets involved in various events on Earth. The family of Mohammad Mahdi Kouhi, a 12-year-old boy who, according to his father, was "stimulated" by watching this series and hanged himself using a scarf and a pull-up bar to transform into a spirit and wander everywhere, filed a complaint against the creators of the series. According to Mizan News Agency, the child intended to become a spirit to understand what his parents were saying about him, which led him to hang himself while playing with his six-year-old brother in their parents' absence. Based on the court's ruling, Ali-Asghar Pourmohammadi, Alireza Afkhami, and Davood Hashemi were found "guilty of causing semi-intentional murder through participation with negligence amounting to 20 percent due to carelessness and failure to comply with the relevant regulations regarding the production and broadcasting of television programs" and were sentenced to pay 20 percent of the full blood money for a Muslim man to the victim's family and a fine of 72 million rials to the government as an alternative punishment to imprisonment. Meanwhile, Davood Hashemi, the producer of "Five Kilometers to Heaven," deemed the court's ruling "unacceptable" and stated that "as television producers who created and presented a series to entertain people and promote culture... we cannot comprehend the connection between the heartbreaking suicide of a child and the claim of being influenced by a series." As Mr. Hashemi mentioned, his lawyer and two other colleagues are "preparing a text to appeal this ruling." He considered the family's complaint against the series' creators as a threat to the "peace of mind of artists" and added that "we are also working on the second season of the Nurses series for Channel One, the last episode of the first season of which was associated with a criminal act, and we are worried that this part of the story may also have legal repercussions for us." Following the complaint from Mohammad Mahdi Kouhi's family and investigations into the relationship between the series and the child's suicide, the film's creators were initially acquitted of the charges. However, after the case was sent to the criminal court, the judges of this court, with a defect in the order to dismiss the prosecution of the director and producer of the film, returned the case to the criminal prosecution office. An official expert in the case stated that the film's creators and Channel Three should have set an age restriction for viewers under 16 based on the film's story and communicated this restriction to viewers through subtitles.