Reuters | Monday, 16 July 2007
Woman Hanging in Iran
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An Iranian woman who killed her husband and paid two men to murder three of her in-laws has been hanged along with her two accomplices at a joint execution watched by thousands of people, a newspaper reported.
The woman, identified only as Houriyeh, 29, and the two men were sentenced to death for the murders three months ago in northwestern Iran, the Tehran-e Emrouz daily said. They were hanged.
Hanging is the most usual form of execution in Iran but women are rarely executed in public.
The daily published a picture of Houriyeh, and the two men, Farhad and Reza, hauled into the air by ropes attached to cranes. Houriyeh was wearing a head-to-toe black chador.
The newspaper said the woman had strangled her husband while he slept. The same night her two male accomplices, who were paid 1 billion rials ($NZ139,600), strangled her husband's parents and stabbed his brother to death, it added.
"She had serious problems with her husband and hated his family. She hired Farhad and Reza to kill her brother-in-law and his parents," an unnamed judiciary official told the paper.
The case attracted great public interest and about 5000 people, including judiciary and police officials, gathered to watch the hangings.
Murder, rape, adultery, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Iran's Islamic Sharia law, imposed since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
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