[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government tried to get the sentence repealed.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 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.
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
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.