RIGHTS GROUPS CONDEMN EXECUTION OF IRANIAN WOMAN

[The United Nations office for human rights said there was evidence that Ms. Jabbari’s conviction was based on a confession coerced under the threat of torture. The death sentence against her prompted widespread denunciations, and President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist government tried to get the sentence repealed. The justice minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, said in early October that efforts to repeal the sentence were underway and that a “good ending” was in sight, although under the Iranian Constitution, his office has no power over the judiciary.]

By Thomas Erdbrink

Reyhaneh Jabbari, shown in Tehran in 2008, was hanged on Saturday.
She had been convicted of murdering a doctor she said had tried to
rape her. Credit Golara Sajjadian/Associated Press

TEHRAN — An Iranian woman convicted of murder for killing a doctor she said had tried to rape her was executed on Saturday morning, despite international condemnation of what Western human rights organizations described as a miscarriage of justice and efforts by the Iranian president to commute her death sentence.

The woman, Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, admitted during her trial in 2009 that she had killed Dr. Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, 47, a physician and a former employee of the Ministry of Intelligence, but insisted that she had done so in self-defense.

The case attracted considerable attention in the West, where human rights organizations organized campaigns declaring Ms. Jabbari innocent of murder and said she was a symbol of injustice toward women. In Iran, where many distrust the hard-line judiciary, which is known for its mass trials and televised confessions, the case provoked much debate.

According to news reports about the trial, Ms. Jabbari, then 19, met Dr. Sarbandi in 2007 in an ice-cream parlor in Tehran, where he overheard her saying she worked as an interior designer. She made an appointment to visit his practice to assess a possible renovation, though what happened afterward is unclear. Some local websites say they saw each other a couple of other times before Dr. Sarbandi was killed on July 7.

That day, Ms. Jabbari had a knife in her bag, which she testified she had bought two days earlier for her protection. A police interrogator told the semiofficial news agency Mehr in August that the victim had been stabbed in the back while on his prayer rug and had collapsed while running down a staircase shouting, “Thief! Thief!” Ms. Jabbari was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to death.

The United Nations office for human rights said there was evidence that Ms. Jabbari’s conviction was based on a confession coerced under the threat of torture. The death sentence against her prompted widespread denunciations, and President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist government tried to get the sentence repealed. The justice minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, said in early October that efforts to repeal the sentence were underway and that a “good ending” was in sight, although under the Iranian Constitution, his office has no power over the judiciary.

After the execution on Saturday, the prosecutor’s office in Tehran said in a statement that Ms. Jabbari had been hanged under Iran’s “eye-for-an-eye” law because the victim’s family had refused to forgive her, saying that the local news media had portrayed Dr. Sarbandi as a rapist.

According to the statement, the fact that Ms. Jabbari had brought a knife to the meeting with Dr. Sarbandi, and that he had been stabbed in the back, indicated that she had intended to murder him. The statement also said that Ms. Jabbari had sent one of her friends a text message on the night of the doctor’s death saying, “I will kill tonight.”

During the trial, Ms. Jabbari said an accomplice had killed Dr. Sarbandi, but she later retracted that claim.

In a statement before the hanging, Amnesty International said that the investigation had been “deeply flawed” and that Ms. Jabbari’s claims “do not appear to have ever been properly investigated.” Iran ranks second after China in the number of executions, with over 600 people executed in 2013.

@  The New York Times

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INDIA SPURNS US OFFER AND PURCHASES GUIDED MISSILES FROM ISRAEL FOR $525M

Deal for at least 8,000 missiles and 300 launchers comes amid border tensions with China and exchanges of fire with Pakistan

Reuters in New Delhi

India has opted to buy Israel’s Spike anti-tank guided missile, a defence ministry source said on Saturday, rejecting a rival US offer of Javelin missiles that Washington had lobbied hard to win.

India will buy at least 8,000 Spike missiles and more than 300 launchers in a deal worth 32bn rupees ($525m), the source said after a meeting of India’s Defence Acquisition Council.

Prime minister Narendra Modi’s five-month-old government wants to clear a backlog of defence orders and boost India’s firepower, amid recent border tensions with China and heavy exchanges of fire with Pakistan across the Kashmiri frontier.

“National security is the paramount concern of the government,” the source quoted Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, who also holds the finance portfolio, as telling the procurement panel. “All hurdles and bottlenecks in the procurement process should be addressed expeditiously so that the pace of acquisition is not stymied.”

Among other business cleared by the panel, India will issue a request for proposals to supply six submarines, added the source, who was not authorised to comment on the record and did not elaborate.

Spike is a man-portable “fire and forget” anti-tank missile that locks on to targets before shooting. It is produced by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, which declined to comment.

It beat out the rival US Javelin weapons system, built by Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Co, that defense secretary Chuck Hagel pitched during Modi’s visit to Washington at the end of September.

Senior US officials had said they were still discussing the Javelin order as part of a broader push to deepen defence industry ties with India by increasing the share of production done in the country.

Analysts estimate that India, the world’s largest arms buyer, will invest as much as $250bn in upgrading its Soviet-era military hardware and close the gap on strategic rival China, which spends three times as much a year on defence.

@ The Guardian