Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, May 1 – A young Iranian woman, who was accused of a committing a crime when she was 17 and whose sentencing had been condemned by international human rights organisations, was hanged earlier today, Iran Focus has learnt.
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, May 1 – A young Iranian woman, who was accused of a committing a crime when she was 17 and whose sentencing had been condemned by international human rights organisations, was hanged earlier today, Iran Focus has learnt.
Iran's Supreme Court earlier this month had approved a death sentence for Delara Darabi, a 23-year-old talented Iranian artist, who denied she had carried out the murder for which she was accused.
Darabi’s lawyer Abdolsamad Khoramshah confirmed that she was hanged in a prison in the northern city of Rasht before he arrived at the scene.
Darabi and her boyfriend, Amir Hossein Sotoudeh, allegedly burgled the home of a cousin of Darabi's father in 2003, fatally stabbing the elderly woman.
Darabi, who initially confessed to committing the murder, was sentenced to death in 2003. However, she subsequently retracted her confession, saying that her boyfriend, who was 19 at the time, had convinced her to falsely admit to the murder on the grounds that she would not face the death penalty because she was under 18.
Her family say that her retraction never sparked a full criminal investigation and that the frail woman tried to commit suicide in prison in 2007.
Many of her paintings have a theme of suffering.
The human rights group Amnesty International says that Iranian authorities executed at least eight juvenile offenders in 2008 "in flagrant violation of international law", adding that Iran was the only country in the world in which juvenile offenders were known to have been executed in 2008.
The group says more than 130 child offenders are on death row in Iran.
Under Iranian law, girls above the age of nine and boys above the age of fifteen are considered as adults and could be executed for capital offences.
Under increasing international pressure, the Iranian regime keeps children on death row in Juvenile Prison until they turn 18.
