اين مادر به حرام که به زهرا کاظمی (نوامبر 2003) تجاوز کرد اشاره ندارد، او به رفتاری که خودش با چند پير زن و پير مرد عابر کرده است اشاره نمی کند. او به قمه کش ها و پليس نقابدارمجهز به قمه و دشنه و شمشير که در شهر ها جوانان ما را، زنان و دختران را به شديد ترين و فجيع ترين روش هائی عذاب می دهند اشاره ندارد…

Iran executes 12 criminals in Tehran

by Stuart Williams Sun Jul 22, 7:39 AM ET

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran early on Sunday hanged 12 people at Tehran's Evin prison for rape and drug trafficking and also broadcast footage of some of the condemned men speaking just minutes before their execution.

Tehran's chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi said the 12 had been executed for "abduction, rape, criminal acts and trading drugs: these are the traders of death."

State television's lunchtime news bulletin devoted a lengthy report to the hangings, showing the 12 sitting on the ground in the yard of the prison with their hands behind their backs as they awaited their deaths.

"What do you have to say now you are being punished?" its reporter asked Ebrahim Eskandari before he was hanged for armed robbery and murder.

"I tell people not to pursue these things. Even if they win they will end up here one day," said the man.

"When you abducted those girls you didn't think you would end up here?" the reporter asked another convict, who grunted "No" in response.

The report showed some of the convicts being led down Evin's long whitewashed corridors to the execution cell, where the camera focused on three bright blue nooses. No footage of the actual executions was transmitted.

It is unusual in Iran for so many convicts to be executed in the same prison at the same time.

Mortazavi said that four other people had also been executed last week in Tehran for drug trafficking, and added that he was asking for execution verdicts for 17 more.

Prosecutors "had requested an execution verdict for another 17 thugs," he told the Fars news agency.

The executions appeared to be linked to a major police crackdown in May on extortion rackets and drug dealing in low-income neighbourhoods. The swoop resulted in hundreds of arrests.

Mortazavi described the convicts in Farsi as "arazel va obash" -- literally "rascals and villains" -- a broad term that was applied to the rapists, drug dealers and other criminals arrested in May's crackdown on thugs.

Those raids sparked controversy in Iran when police paraded the arrested men through the streets and hung watering cans used for lavatory ablutions around the neck of at least one suspect.

Sunday's hangings brought to at least 137 the number of executions carried out in the Islamic republic so far this year, most of them by hanging and often in public.

At least 177 people were executed in 2006, according to Amnesty International, making Iran the most prolific applier of the death penalty in the world after China.

Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.

Iran this month also said that a convicted adulterer had been stoned to death in a village in the northwestern province of Qazvin, the first time it had confirmed such an execution in five years.

The news sparked international condemnation of Iran, which was supposed to have suspended stoning under a 2002 directive issued by judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

The judiciary has since launched a probe into the local judge who ordered that the sentence be carried out, saying that while stoning is allowed under Islamic law there was insufficient coordination in this case.

Courtesy of: Yahoo/AFP