Tehran Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi (2nd L) attends an execution by hanging in Tehran on August 2, 2007. (Reuters)
February 20, 2021
An Iranian lawyer said Friday that prison authorities hanged his female client despite suffering a heart attack moments before the sentence was carried out.
Zahra Esmaili was found guilty of the murder of her husband Alireza Zamani and sentenced to death.
Zamani was a senior agent in the Ministry of Intelligence, according to Esmaili’s lawyer, Omid Moradi.
Esmaili was executed on Wednesday in Rajaei-Shahr prison in the city of Karaj, west of the capital Tehran, along with seven others, the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said on Wednesday.
But Moradi said that number is incorrect, and that his client was hanged along with 16 other men.
Esmaili suffered a stroke after seeing several men hanged before her, Moradi wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post, adding that her death certificate states “cardiac arrest” as the cause of death.
“Zahra [Esmaili] … died” before it was her turn, “but despite that, they hanged her lifeless body,” Moradi wrote.
Iran has the highest number of executions in the world after China. It has executed 42 people since the beginning of this year, according to IHR.
Al Arabiya
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