Iran: two sisters spared stoning

The Iranian judiciary is to free 2 sisters sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, after they were cleared of the charges in a retrial, a press report said today.

Sisters Zohreh, 28, and Azar Kabiri, 29, each mother of 1, were arrested in February 2007 after the husband of one of them presented a film allegedly showing them with other men.

Last week "Tehran penal court judges acquitted the 2 sisters of adultery in a retrial and they will be freed soon'', the reformist Etemad daily said.

In August 2007 the 2 received 99 lashes for an "illegitimate relationship'' and were then freed.

They were later rearrested and sentenced in November 2007 to death by stoning for adultery.

The verdict was halted after Iran's judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi said the video was not sufficient evidence for the ruling and that their living conditions had not been considered in the trial, the report said.

Their lawyer argued that the defendants could not be tried twice for the same offence.

Zohreh and Azar's husbands had withdrawn their complaint, declaring that the women in the video footage were not their wives, Etemad said.

The 2 were among 9 people - 7 women and 2 men - in Iranian prisons awaiting execution by stoning.

Under Iran's Islamic law, adultery is still punishable by stoning, which involves the public hurling of stones at a partially buried convict.

A man is buried up to his waist and a woman up to her shoulders.

Convicts are spared if they can free themselves.

5 Iranians have reportedly been stoned to death in the past 4 years, including two men in Mashhad in December, despite a 2002 directive by Ayatollah Shahrudi imposing a moratorium on such killings.

The executions have drawn international condemnation, with the UN and the EU calling on Iran to abolish stoning.

Iranian rights campaigners have also been urged the Islamic republic to remove the punishment from law.

In August, the judiciary said it has scrapped the punishment in Iran's new Islamic penal code, whose outlines have been adopted by parliament but whose details are yet to be debated by MPs before final approval.

Source: News. com, Jan. 21, 2009