Awww, Iran has a heart after all. Has decided not to stone the wrongly accused mother to death
Instead, she will be hanged.
In Iran, the only ‘evidence’ needed to sentence a woman to death is an accusation by one man.
NY POST The Iranian woman who became the center of an international outcry after being sentenced to death by stoning for adultery is to be hanged for murdering her husband, local media reported Tuesday.The new fate planned for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was announced by Iran’s national prosecutor general, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, at a news conference in Tehran Monday. “According to the court’s ruling, she is convicted of murder and her death sentence has priority over her punishment [for committing adultery]”, the Tehran Times reported, citing Mohseni-Ejei.
The newspaper said that the prosecutor’s remarks mean Ashtiani — an illiterate 43-year-old Azeri mother of two whose husband was killed by her cousin — will not be stoned to death for committing adultery because she should first be executed for murder.
Ashtiani has spent years in prison under threat of being stoned for alleged adultery with her cousin. She has been denied access to her family and lawyer, who were persecuted for publicizing her case. The strength of the outcry in the West has been credited with delaying the sentence.
The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly tackled about Ashtiani’s case when he visited New York last week to address the United Nations. In contradiction to his country’s judicial officials,Ahmadinejad denied that Ashtiani had ever been sentenced to death by stoning and suggested that the international outcry had been whipped up by Western media propaganda.
Sajad Ghaderzade, 22, a bus driver from Tabriz, said that his mother had been acquitted of murdering her husband but sentenced to be stoned to death after being convicted, instead, of adultery. Monday’s statement by the prosecutor general suggested that the courts have overturned their earlier judgment.
On the day of Ahmadinejad’s address an open letter was released from Ashtiani’s son to Ban Ki-Moon, the U.N. secretary-general, begging him to intervene to save his mother’s life, dismissing the Islamic Republic’s professed commitment to human rights as an “absolute lie” and calling for an international ban on stoning.
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