He "also denounced by name some senior clerics, including Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi for having encouraged or issued fatwas, or religious orders for the assassinations". Conservatives have attacked Ganji and denied his claim. Collections of his articles appeared in books, notably, "The Dungeon of Ghosts" and "The Red Eminence And The Grey Eminences" ("Alijenob Sorkhpoosh va Alijenob-e Khakestari" (2000)) focusing on the involvement of the former President of Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and his Minister of Intelligence, Ali Fallahian, in the chain murders. "The Red Eminence and the Grey Eminences" has been described by the "Washington Post" newspaper in the US as "the Iranian equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago". The one volume of his writings to appear in English translation is "The Road to Democracy in Iran" (MIT Press, April 2008). Ganji took part in a conference in Berlin held by the Heinrich Boell Foundation under the title "Iran after the elections" held in the wake of the Majlis elections of February 2000 which resulted in a huge victory by reformist candidates. The gathering was termed "anti-Islamic" and "anti-revolutionary" by Iranian state TV, IRIB, which broadcast part of the conference on 18 April 2000. Returning to Iran from the conference he was arrested on 22 April 2000, accused of having "damaged national security." Found guilty, in January 2001 he was sentenced to ten years followed by five years internal exile, which meant he would be kept in a specific city other than Tehran and could not leave the country. On 15 May 2001 an appeal court reduced his 10-year sentence to six months and overturned his additional sentence of five years' internal exile. However, the Tehran prosecutor, challenged the appeal court decision and brought new charges against him in connection with newspaper articles he had written prior to April 2000, and his possession of photocopies of foreign newspapers. On 16 July 2001 he was sentenced to six years imprisonment on charges of "collecting confidential information harmful to national security and spreading propaganda against the Islamic system". Like other political prisoners before him, Ganji took to writing from his prison cell. His political manifestos and open letters were smuggled out of jail and published on the internet, – two letters "to the free people of the world":. In his last year in prison Ganji went on a hunger strike for more than 80 days from 19 May 2005 until early August 2005 except for a 12-day period of leave he was granted on 30 May 2005 ahead of the ninth presidential elections on 17 June 2005.