FOR A year little has been heard of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Locked away on death row in the Tabriz prison in the west of Iran, the 44-year-old mother of two had in 2010 been the focus of an international campaign for clemency after the Iranian authorities announced that she was due to die by stoning for adultery.
After what appeared to be a forced confession on TV there was only silence. Then on Sunday Malek Ajdar Sharifi, justice chief for East Azerbaijan province, announced, or seemed to, that her sentence was to be commuted to death by hanging. Clerics were being consulted on the issue because the prison did not have the facilities for stoning. Now, however, Sharifi says his comments were misinterpreted. “This case is following its normal course in line with the law,” he said.
Worryingly, it is likely that the judge’s remarks, whatever he said, were a way of testing the sensitivity of the case ahead of a more imminent execution. In the past, stoning sentences, under international pressure, have been changed to hanging – Abdollah Farivar, a music teacher who was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery was instead hanged in 2009.
Ashtiani was sentenced to death by stoning for conducting an “illicit relationship outside marriage” in 2006 after suffering years of abuse at the hands of her opium-addict husband, Ebrahim Ghaderzade, who also allegedly sold her for sex. She was also sentenced to death, reduced to 10 years, for assisting in his murder.
Although the EU and other international bodies have appealed for mercy, it is crucial such appeals, including from Ireland, be renewed immediately.
At least 600 people were executed in Iran in 2011 up to the end of November, while seven have been stoned to death since 2006. Some 14 are currently facing death by stoning, a legal but rare punishment in a handful of Muslim countries – as well as Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Christian woman Asia Bibi has just survived her third Christmas in the women’s prison of Sheikhupura, in the Punjab, awaiting execution for allegedly blaspheming the prophet Muhammad. She told visitors, who described her as very frail, that a guard has been suspended for trying to strangle her. “I am given raw material to cook for myself,” she told Life for All, a Christian organisation, “since the administration fears I might be poisoned, as other Christians accused of blasphemy were poisoned or killed in jail.”