LONDON — An Afghan journalist has been sentenced to death for distributing an article downloaded from a Web site that was deemed to have “insulted Islam.” The ruling by judges in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif betrayed the mounting level of Taliban-style intimidation of the press.

Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh’s crime was to have passed around a piece questioning why Muslim women cannot have multiple husbands in the same way as their menfolk can legally take four wives.

Mr. Kaambakhsh, a student journalist on the New World newspaper, was prosecuted for downloading this article, apparently gleaned from an Iranian Web site, and distributing it to his friends.

On Tuesday, a court found him guilty of “insulting Islam” and sentenced him to death.

No lawyer represented Mr. Kaambakhsh, 23, during the hearing, which appears to have taken place in secret in Mazar-i-Sharif. The journalist will appeal against the verdict and both Afghan and international campaigners denounced his treatment.

“This is unfair, this is illegal,” the president of the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association, Rahimullah Samander, said. “This is too big for a small mistake — he just printed a copy and looked at this and read it. How can we believe in this ‘democracy’ if we can’t even read, we can’t even study?” The association urged President Karzai to intervene and quash the death sentence. The penalty must be confirmed by a higher court before it can be carried out.

But campaigners believe that the court’s real motive was not protecting the honor of Islam. Mr. Kaambakhsh’s brother, Yaqub Ibrahimi, also works as a journalist and has written a series of reports on atrocities committed by senior politicians in northern Afghanistan.

Jean MacKenzie, the country director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which trains Afghan journalists, said: “We feel very strongly that this is a complete fabrication on the part of the authorities up in Mazar, designed to put pressure on Parwez’s brother, Yaqub, who has done some of the hardest-hitting pieces outlining abuses by some very powerful commanders in Balkh and the other northern provinces.”

The overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 brought a new era of press freedom in Afghanistan. Dozens of newspapers and television stations have sprung up across the country. In practice, however, the authorities are deeply suspicious of journalists and all press outlets face pressure and harassment.

[Elsewhere, the Associated Press reported that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is unlikely to stage a spring offensive in the volatile eastern region bordering Pakistan, the commander of American forces in that area said yesterday.

Army Major General David Rodriguez told a Pentagon news conference that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters operating from havens in the largely ungoverned tribal areas of western Pakistan appear to have shifted their focus toward targets inside Pakistan rather than across the border in Afghanistan.

That is partly due to ordinary Afghans’ disillusionment with the Taliban movement, he said, and partly because the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters see new opportunities to accelerate instability inside Pakistan. He also said Afghan security forces are becoming more effective partners with American forces.

The Associated Press also reported that the number of students and teachers killed in Taliban attacks has tripled in the past year in a campaign to close schools and force teenage boys to join the Islamic militia, Afghanistan’s education minister said.

While the overall state of Afghan education shows improvement, Education Ministry numbers point to a sharp decline in security for students, teachers and schools in the south, where the Taliban thrives: The number of students out of classes because of security concerns has hit 300,000 since March 2007, compared with 200,000 in the previous 12 months, while the number of schools closing has risen to 590 from 350.

The Taliban know that educated Afghans won’t join the militants, so a closed school leaves students with two options — to join the Taliban or “to cross the border and go into those hate madrassas,” Education Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar said in an interview Tuesday, referring to Islamic seminaries in Pakistan where “they will be professionally trained as terrorists.”

The United Nations said it couldn’t confirm that Taliban fighters were upping efforts to recruit schoolboys, and no educational aid organizations that could confirm Mr. Atmar’s claims are working in provinces such as Helmand in the dangerous south.