Iran hanging: Fears for child bride Zeinab Sekaanvand
Human rights
activists say a 22-year-old woman whose execution was delayed while she was
pregnant could be hanged within days in Iran.
Zeinab Sekaanvand was
convicted of killing her husband, whom she says beat her for months.
Her execution was
postponed after she remarried in prison and conceived a child. Last month she gave
birth to a stillborn baby, putting her at risk of death by hanging as soon as
13 October.
Doctors said the young
woman's baby died in her womb two days before she gave birth as a result of the
shock she suffered after her friend and cellmate was executed.
Amnesty
International says Ms Sekaanvand comes from a poor, conservative
Iranian-Kurdish family, and ran away from home aged 15 to marry her first
husband, Hossein Sarmadi. She said she saw
marrying him as her only chance for a better life. But not long after their
wedding, she said, he started beating her regularly and verbally abusing her. The young woman
registered several police complaints against her husband, none of which were
investigated. Her husband rejected her requests for a divorce, and when she
tried to return to her parents, they disowned her for eloping.
Ms Sekaanvand was 17
years old when her husband died. She was arrested, and allegedly confessed to
stabbing him to death. She said she was held at the police station for the next
20 days and repeatedly tortured by police officers. Before being convicted
by a criminal court in West Azerbaijan Province, she retracted her confession
and told the judge that her husband's brother, who she said had repeatedly
raped her, had committed the murder.
Ms Sekaanvand said he
promised to pardon her if she took the blame - as Islamic law allows a murder
victim's family to accept money in lieu of execution. Iranian judges can
spare under-18s the death penalty if they do not understand the nature of their
offence. This was not investigated in Ms Sekaanvand's case, although an
official examination found she was suffering from a "depressive
disorder" characterised by insomnia and difficulty making decisions.
In 2015, Ms Sekaanvand
married a fellow prisoner at Oroumieh Central Prison in northern Iran, and
became pregnant. Her execution was delayed until after the birth, as it is
illegal to execute a pregnant woman in Iran. Human
Rights Watch says that as a party to the Convention on the Rights
of the Child, Iran is obliged to outlaw death sentences for minors.
According to Amnesty,
Iran has executed at least one person convicted for an offence when they were a
child in 2016, and has at least 49 more child offenders on death row.
