Iran airs confession by woman in stoning case

An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning confessed helping a man kill her husband

and re-enacted the alleged crime in an interview broadcast by Iranian state TV.

State-run English language Press television said on Saturday that its half-hour film

was meant to show the other side of a story that has been misrepresented by

international media, but it may prompt yet more questions about human rights and

press freedom in Iran.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s sentence to be stoned for adultery —

the only crime that carries that penalty under Iran’s Islamic Shariah law —

was declared to have been suspended in September after an international outcry.

Rumours that she had been released spread around the Internet on Thursday

 after human rights campaigners in Europe apparently misinterpreted photographs

 released ahead of the broadcast, showing Ashtiani at her home where the crime

scene reconstruction was filmed, as indicating she was free.  

In the film, Ashtiani acts out her alleged role in the murder of her husband in a

reconstruction filmed in black-and-white in a shaky hand-held camera style,

 accompanied by dramatic music. It is not clear why she had agreed to take part

in the film. She is shown injecting her husband with a sedative before an actor

playing her lover arrives to attach wires to his feet and neck and plug them into an

electrical socket.He had decided to kill my husband by electrocuting him,”

she says in the interview.The reconstruction is interspersed with actual photographs

of the dead man, Ibrahim Abedzadeh, with vivid burns on his body. The murder

happened in 2005.

Manipulated

The Ashtiani case has further strained relations with the West as Tehran has

come under tightened sanctions aimed at pressuring it to curb its atomic

activities, which some countries believe are aimed at building nuclear weapons.

Iran says international media have manipulated the story to demonise the

Islamic Republic. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly denied that

Ashtiani was ever sentenced to stoning.

The programme’s narrator said the stoning sentence handed down by Iran’s

Supreme Court in 2006 was “symbolic” and unlikely ever to be carried out, due

 to a legal change in 2005 that aimed to ban stoning but “has yet to be fully

integrated into official Iranian law”.

The documentary makers say they tracked down Ashtiani’s lover and secretly

 filmed him. But the report does not say whether Isa Taheri, who was tried for

murder along with Ashtiani, was convicted nor why he is apparently free when

she is in jail. Ashtiani recounts how Taheri planned the murder.

“He said tomorrow I want to kill your husband. I asked: ‘how?’. He said:

‘You inject him with a drug and make him unconscious then I’ll come and

electrocute him.’”

Press TV said it had also spoken to two German reporters who were arrested in

October as they were interviewing Ashtiani’s son, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, but that they

had refused to be interviewed on camera. It identified them as Marcus Hellwig and

Jens Koch, working for Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, and showed a still photograph

of them in an Iranian cafe and pictures of their passports. The Germans were

arrested along with Ghaderzadeh and Ashtiani’s lawyer in whose office the interview

 was taking place.Berlin has appealed for the release of the reporters, who judicial

officials say entered on tourist visas and so had no right to work as journalists

under Iran’s strict media controls.

Germany, along with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council,

resumed talks with Tehran this week, seeking reassurances its nuclear activities will

not lead it to acquire atomic weapons.

While Iranian officials say Ashtiani’s case is purely a matter for the judiciary,

 it has become an international political cause and the head of Iran’s Council of

Human Rights said last month there was “a good chance that her life could be saved”.

The fate of the German reporters may also prove a political-diplomatic matter.

A spokesman said the government was considering a request to release them over

Christmas, something that would send a goodwill message to Berlin.