Reyhaneh Jabbari was set be hanged tomorrow morning after seven years in prison. She killed a man she said was trying to rape her
A 26-year-old Iranian woman who was going to be hanged tomorrow after killing a man she claims was trying to rape her has had a stay of execution.
Reyhaneh Jabbari was sentenced to death by a criminal court in Tehran in 2009 after what Amnesty International called a ‘deeply flawed investigation and trial which failed to examine all of the evidence’.
In 2007 the former decorator stabbed Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, who she claims lured her to his house with a promise of work and tried to sexually assault her.
Her mother, Shole Paravan, confirmed the execution had been postponed. Today she and other supporters of Jabbari went to Rajaiy Shahr Prison, about 20 miles west of Tehran, to protest the pending execution.
Amnesty International said the execution has only been delayed for 10 days.
Paravan told Fox News about the heart-breaking farewell phone call she received from her daughter before the postponement.
‘I am currently handcuffed and there is a car waiting outside to take me for the execution of the sentence,’ Jabbari told her mother.
‘Goodbye, dear Mum. All of my pains will finish early tomorrow morning.
‘I’ll see you in the next world and I will never leave you again because being separated from you is the most difficult thing to do in the world.”
There are concerns over the way the case was handled by Iranian authorities. Amnesty reports she was placed in solitary confinement for two months, where she did not have access to a lawyer or her family.
Earlier Jabbari’s mother said in a Facebook post that prison authorities told her she would have to go to the facility to ‘collect the body’ tomorrow.
‘Instead of continuing to execute people, authorities in Iran should reform their judicial system, which dangerously relies on processes which fail to meet international law and standards for fair trial,’ said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director at Amnesty International.
‘Under international human rights standards people charged with crimes punishable by death are entitled to the strictest observance of all fair trial guarantees.’
The Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which opposes the nation’s leadership, said she was secretly transferred between prisons in a bid to prevent protests by other inmates who are sympathetic to her plight.
Source : ColoradoNewsDay