Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

IRAN: SAKINEH FREED AFTER 9 YEARS ON DEATH ROW

March 18, 2014: the Iranian regime announced that Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, was allowed to leave prison after almost nine years on death row.
The head of Iran’s Human Rights Committee, Mohammad Javad Larijani, said that the Iranian regime had released Ashtiani for “good behaviour”.
The stoning sentence against Sakineh for adultery was issued by the original court in the city of Tabriz in 2006 and was upheld by a different appeals court in 2007, but in 2010 Iran suspended the stoning sentence pending a new examination of her case.
However, the judgement, which drew widespread international condemnation, was overtaken by a separate death sentence on charges of complicity in her husband's murder, which was commuted to a 10-year jail term in 2007.
Mohammad Javad Larijani charged that the focus on the sentence for the adultery over the murder one was just Western "propaganda". "The stoning sentence might have been raised in this case, but the finalised verdict, which was death by hanging, was for the murder not the adultery," Larijani said. "We managed to get the consent of the victim's family to forgo qisas (retribution) and people paid the blood money," he added. In this case the children of Mohammadi-Ashtiani and her slain husband, forgive the accused. (Sources: AFP and thetimes.co.uk, 18/03/2014)