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An Iranian blogger convicted of insulting the country's religious leaders has died in jail after taking a drug overdose.Omidreza Mirsayafi, 29, died in Tehran's notorious Evin prison on Wednesday, just over a month after a judge gave him a two-and-a-half year sentence for posting comments on his blog about figures including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini .

Human rights campaigners called for prison officials to be prosecuted after Mirsayafi took extra doses of tranquilisers prescribed by prison doctors. He was suffering from depression and had previously attempted to commit suicide, according to a fellow inmate.

His death followed that of Amir Hossein Heshmatsaran, founder of an Iranian opposition group called the National Unity Front, who died on 6 March while serving an eight-year sentence. Heshmatsaran's family alleged that he had died because of negligence, after suffering a stroke.

Iran's Judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi said Monday that journalist Roxana Saberi's sentence was commuted as a gesture of "Islamic mercy" because she expressed regret and cooperated with authorities.

Some Iranian sources also tell CNN her release is a gesture to President Obama who publicly insisted Saberi had not been spying for the United States.

When she was first arrested earlier this year, Saberi told her father she had been caught buying wine, illegal in Islamic Iran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry then said she had been working without a valid journalist permit, and finally in a one-day closed door trial, she was accused, and convicted of spying for the United States. "Without press credentials and under the name of being a reporter, she was carrying out espionage activities," Hassan Haddad, a deputy public prosecutor, told the Iranian Students News Agency on April 9. Her sentence -- eight years in Iran's notorious Evin Prison.

An Iranian-American journalist accused of spying in Iran went on trial this week and a verdict is expected soon, an Iranian official has said.

Ms Saberi, 31, is being held in Evin prison near Tehran. The journalist, 31, worked briefly for the BBC three years ago. She has also worked for the American public radio network NPR and the TV network Fox News. She has been in custody in Tehran since late January.

Ms Saberi originally faced the less serious accusations of buying alcohol, then working as a journalist without a valid press card, but last week Iranian prosecutors accused her of spying for the US.