Iran faced widespread international condemnation today after executing a woman who had been convicted of murdering the wife of her football player lover.
Shahla Jahed was hanged before dawn in the courtyard of Evin prison in Tehran in the presence of the murdered woman's family. Iran is second only to China in its use of capital punishment. Last year it staged 388 executions, according to Amnesty International.
Amnesty and other human rights organisations had called on Iran to stop the hanging on the grounds that there were doubts about the fairness of Jahed's trial. "Shahla Jahed's execution, like all such executions, is an example of premeditated and cold-blooded killing by the state, and is particularly distressing as there were serious concerns over the fairness of the trial, and the evidence used against the defendant," Amnesty said. The Foreign Office also condemned the execution.
Jahed was found guilty of the murder in 2002 of Laleh Saharkhizan, the wife of Naser Mohammadkhani, a football legend who rose to fame in the mid-1980s and who coached Tehran's Persepolis club. A documentary about her case, Red Card, was banned. According to the Isna news agency, Saharkhizan's brother carried out the final stage of the execution by kicking away the stool on which Jahed was standing with the noose around her neck.
Just before the hanging Jahed prayed, then burst into tears, shouting for her life to be spared. The victim's family could, according to Iranian law, have spared her life by pardoning her.
Jahed, who had been held in Evin prison for the past nine years, was sentenced to death on the basis of her confession, which she later repeatedly retracted at her public trial.
In 2008, the then chief of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, ordered a fresh investigation and did not sanction her execution.
Activists in Iran suspect Jahed was forced to confess to the stabbing. Karim Lahidji, president of the Iranian League for Human Rights, described her as "a victim of a misogynous society". The hanging came amid uncertainty about the fate of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, whose sentence of death by stoning for adultery was suspended after an international outcry. But she may yet be hanged for involvement in the murder of her husband.
Following the murder, Jahed was arrested as the prime suspect but refused to talk for nearly a year. Mohammadkhani was also imprisoned for several months on charges of complicity but was finally released after the authorities said Jahed had confessed to committing the crime alone.
Mohammadkhani was in Germany when the killing happened, but it emerged later that he was "temporarily married" to Jahed, a practice allowed under Shia Islam. Temporary marriage, known as sigheh in Iran, allows men to take on wives for anything from a few hours to years, on condition that any offspring are legally and financially provided for. Critics of the tradition see it as legalised prostitution.
Fereshteh Ghazi, 31, a former cellmate of Jahed's who spent two weeks in prison with her in 2004 told the Guardian from Atlanta, Georgia: "Even if Shahla had committed the crime, which she didn't, Shahla and the murdered wife are both victims of a male-dominated society, a system that gives all the rights to men. Shahla, Laleh [the murdered wife], and all other women like them are all victims of flaws in the Iranian judicial system and Iran's unequal judicial system. Even the person who pulled away the chair today in her execution is a victim of the system."
"I can say that she was a very emotional woman. She was always very energetic and happy and at the same time she was very sad. You could see the sadness in her eyes, but she had an optimistic outlook … she used to help all the new inmates.
"Like her first appearance at her trial she told me in the prison that she was beaten up for 11 months and she was tortured. But she didn't confess until Naser Mohammadkhani came to see her and asked her to take responsibility for the murder and she did so."
Shahla is the 146th person to be executed in Iran this year.