Iran executed on Saturday a 26-year-old woman who had spent five years on death row for the murder of a former intelligence official, defying international pressure to spare her life. Reyhaneh Jabbari was hanged at dawn, the official IRNA news agency quoted the Tehran prosecutor’s office as saying.
A message posted on the homepage of a Facebook campaign that was set up to try to save her states ‘Rest in Peace,’ confirmed the report. Amnesty International said in a statement issued late Friday that Jabbari was due to be executed for the 2007 stabbing of Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi. A UN human rights monitor had said the killing of Sarbandi was an act of self-defence after he tried to sexually assault Jabbari, and that her trial in 2009 had been deeply flawed.