A human rights group said Monday that the Tehran Revolutionary Court had told lawyers of two detained students that they had been sentenced to 16 years’ jail.

The two Sharif University award-winning science students, Amir Hossein Moradi and Ali Younesi, were arrested April 2020, Amnesty International reported at the time, with a judiciary spokesman announcing explosive devices had been found in their homes and that they had links to “counter-revolutionary groups.”

“The authorities violated their [Moradi and Younesi] right to be presumed innocent by publicly accusing them of ties to ‘counterrevolutionary’ groups apparently based on their families’ real or perceived association” with the opposition group MEK, Amnesty wrote in November 2021.

HRANA reported Monday that Moradi and Younesi had been convicted of ‘corruption on earth’ and ‘conspiracy against the [political] system.’ Reza Younesi, Ali’s brother, told the US-funded Radio Farda that the verdict had come with the two due for release on bail as there was “no evidence to convict them.”

In a letter January, several Nobel Laureates and leading academicsasked United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet to petition Iran over Moradi and Younesi. In May 2021, more than 170 professors and students at Sharif University wrote a letter to the Iranian authorities demanding their release. Younesi won the gold medal in the International Astronomy Olympiad in 2018 in China, and Moradi was an award-winning physics student.