Makwan Mouloudzadeh, an Iranian Kurd, has been hanged despite his alleged rape victims withdrawing their accusations and a judicial review and stay of execution being ordered into the sentence.
Makwan Mouloudzadeh, 20, was accused of raping raping three teenage boys when he was 13 years old.
The hanging took place on Wednesday morning at a prison in Kermanshah province in western Iran.
“On 11 November the head of the justice administration of Kermanshah received an order from the judiciary head, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, to stop the verdict being carried out,” the lawyer, Saeed Eqbali, was quoted as saying. “But the case, which was supposed to be reviewed in Tehran, was sent back from there to Kermanshah, and the execution was carried out quickly,” the lawyer said.
Clarisa Bencomo of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) group told Reuters news agency she had received information that Mr Mouloudzadeh’s family had been told to come and pick up his body. Her organisation had spoken to people who had seen the body, she said.
Makwan was arrested in September 2006 after three boys complained to police he had raped them seven years earlier. During court proceedings, Makwan withdrew a confession he had made earlier, saying it had been the result of coercion by the police, the US-based group says and the alleged victims also later withdrew their claims.
As a state that is party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Iran has undertaken not to execute child offenders.
Iran has executed at least five minors so far in 2007 and 27 minors since 1990.
For more background information about Makwan’s Moloudzadeh visit: http://scenews.blog.com//Makwan+Moloudzadeh/