Reyhaneh Jabbari, Who Had Been Sentenced to Death Under Qesas (retribution-in-kind), was Executed on 25 October
Reyhaneh Jabbari, aged 26, was executed in the early hours of 25 October in Raja’i Shahr Prison, in the city of Karaj. She had been transferred there late on 24 October from Shahr-e Ray Prison. Earlier that day, while still in Shahr-e Ray Prison, she had been granted a final visit from her parents, grandparents and siblings which lasted for a little over an hour. Her mother, Shohle Pakravan, told Amnesty International that the prison authorities would not tell her which prison her daughter was being transferred to for implementation of the death sentence. The family had planned to protest in front of the four Tehran-area prisons and eventually learned that Reyhaneh Jabbari was at Raja’i Shahr Prison. State media announced Reyhaneh Jabbari’s execution on 25 October and the same day Shohle Pakravan posted on Facebook that she had been told to collect her daughter’s body from Behesht-e Zahra, a cemetery in Tehran, at 10am on 25 October and wrote, “I am sat at the vast sea of pain and agony…I have lost my love”.
Her execution had been stayed at least once in September after she had been transferred to Raja’i Shahr Prison to be executed early the next morning. Shohle Pakravan called the prison authorities there, and they confirmed it.
Reyhaneh Jabbari had been arrested in 2007 for the killing of Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Reyhaneh Jabbari confessed to stabbing the man immediately after her arrest, though she did not have a lawyer present at the time. She said the killing had taken place in self-defence, and claimed she had done so after he had tried to sexually abuse her. Following her arrest, Reyhaneh Jabbari was held in solitary confinement for two months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where she did not have access to a lawyer or her family.
Reyhaneh Jabbari was sentenced to death under qesas (“retribution-in-kind”) by a criminal court in Tehran in 2009.
The death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court the same year. Her family were told in March 2014 that the sentence had gone for implementation. Sentences of qesas are not open to pardon or amnesty by the Supreme Leader.
Amnesty International believes that Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi’s association with the Ministry of Intelligence may have affected the impartiality of the court’s investigation
No further action is requested from the UA Network. Many thanks to all who sent appeals.
This is the second update of UA 85/14. Further information: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE13/053/2014/en
Name: Reyhaneh Jabbari
Gender m/f: f