TEHRAN: Iran hanged Saturday a woman convicted of murdering a former intelligence officer defying international appeals for a stay of execution.
Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, who had been on death row for seven years, was put to death at dawn, the official IRNA news agency quoted the Tehran prosecutor’s office as saying.
Reyhaneh was hanged in the early hours of Saturday after being found guilty of killing Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi in July 2007.
Tehran’s Public Prosecutor issued a statement on Saturday confirming the execution and noted that Jabbari had preplanned the murder and purchased the knife to kill Sarbandi two days prior to the incident.
Reyhaneh has confessed to the murder claiming that she had stabbed the man to death to defend herself against attempted rape, but her claims were rejected based on further investigations and crime scene evidence.
Iran’s judiciary had given several deadlines for Sarbandi’s family to spare Reyhana under an Islamic sharia law provision that allows a death sentence for murder to be commuted to jail time with the agreement of the victim’s family.
Under Islamic law, a convicted murderer is put to death if the victim’s family demands execution.
But relatives of Sarbandi, a 47-year-old surgeon who earlier worked for the intelligence ministry, refused the pleas to spare her life that she tell “the truth.”
According to Jalal Sarbandi, the victim’s eldest son, Jabbari testified that a man was present in the apartment where his father was killed but she had refused to reveal his identity.
He told two of Iran’s reformist daily newspapers, Shargh and Etemad, in April that his family “would not even contemplate mercy until truth is unearthed,” about her alleged accomplice.
Reyhaneh’s mother was allowed to visit her for one hour on Friday. Agencies
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