Woman hanged despite dying from heart attack watching 16 executions before hers
A woman has been publicly hanged by her victim’s mother despite already being dead.
Zahra Esmaili was sentenced to death after she ‘finally snapped’ and shot dead her abusive husband in July 2017.
On the day of her hanging, she died from a heart attack while watching 16 people being executed before her.
Despite this, it was decided that her corpse should be hanged and her mother-in-law allowed to kick a stool from beneath her feet.
Officials denied the account, but her lawyer said the cause of death was cardiac arrest rather than hanging.
Esmaili’s daughter was jailed for five years and her son was also arrested as a co-conspirator.
Both claim to have been sleeping at the time and the son helped the mother-in-law kick the stool.
It is thought Zahra’s case was made public to increase public terror over the prospect of being publicly executed for offences.
Speaking to the Mirror, Iran HR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: ‘This is the effect they’re looking for. And it’s the same in each case: “Obey our rules. This can happen to you.” That’s the message.’
A UN human rights expert in October told the BBC almost every execution in Iran was an ‘arbitrary deprivation of life’.
Under Iran’s laws, citizens can be executed for crimes not deemed to be among the ‘most serious’ under international law, including drug trafficking.
The month before Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s election victory in June 2021 saw the most executions on the country’s records – at 51.
Activists have pleaded with the West to tackle Iran’s death penalty record and human rights violations as part of negotiations over the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.
Hadi Ghaemi, the Iran executive director at the Centre for Human Rights, urged: ‘We cannot sacrifice human rights at the mantle of the nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic.
‘The Iranian authorities insisted that human rights not be a part of the nuclear negotiations from day one; it is beyond hypocrisy for them to now insist that human rights sanctions should be lifted in order to resume the Iran nuclear deal.’
It follows Iran’s foreign ministry saying Sir Salman Rushdie and his supporters ‘are to blame for what happened to him’ after the 75-year-old Satanic Verses writer was repeatedly knifed in the body and liver in New York, leaving him likely to lose one eye with nerves in his arm also severed.
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