The BBC has a report on the successful appeal by Farhad Hakimzadeh, convicted in January of 14 counts of theft. The Appeal Court has reduced his sentence from two years to 12 months, apparently because of the man’s age and the fact that his crimes did little permanent damage:
Mr Justice Blake, giving the court’s judgement, said: “This was not a case of someone stealing to improve his library then preventing scholars from accessing those books in the future. All the books have been recovered and so have the pages.
“He has suffered a considerable humiliation and loss of reputation at the age of 61 years.”
The decision means that Hakimzadeh, having served 104 days, will be released in 78 days time.A spokesman for the British Library said: “When Hakimzadeh damaged and stole pages from Library items he abused the trust that we extend to all researchers using our collections.
“We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.”
The spokesman added that the Library will “continue to pursue a number of routes with the aim of achieving redress for the damage he caused.”
