According to Amnesty International, Iran carried out 73 executions of juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, despite having ratified the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention on the rights of the child, which strictly prohibit the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed below the age of 18. Tajik was arrested in May 2012 alongside a number of other teenagers. Tajik was held incommunicado in solitary confinement for 15 days after his arrest and was subjected to torture including beatings, floggings and suspension by the arms and feet, Amnesty said. He later retracted the confessions given during this period.
James Lynch, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program
at Amnesty International, called on Iran to immediately halt Tajiki’s execution.
“Imposing the death penalty on someone who was a child at the time of the crime flies in the face of international human rights law, which absolutely prohibits the use of the death penalty for crimes committed under the age of 18,” he said.
“It is particularly horrendous that the Iranian authorities are adamant to proceed with the execution when this case was marked by serious fair trial concerns and primarily relied on torture-tainted evidence. “Iran’s bloodstained record of sending juvenile offenders to the gallows, routinely after grossly unfair trials, makes an absolute mockery of juvenile justice and shamelessly betrays the commitments Iran has made to children’s rights.”
According to Sharia Law children between ages of 9 to 13 are considered criminally responsible. Under this law Girls at age 9 and boys at age 15 are considered to be fully developed and they even can get married.
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Based on other reports Nadarkhani and his wife Tina Pasandideh were freed but the other 3 men: Yasser Mosayebzadeh, Saheb Fadaie and Mohammad Vafadar remain in prison.
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They were hanged at dawn on Wednesday in Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) Prison.
One of the prisoners remains unidentified while the other one is believed to be Reza Cheshm-Nour.
A number of other death-row prisoners in the jail remain at imminent risk of execution.
The latest hangings bring to at least 72 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and one is believed to have been a juvenile offender.
Meanwhile the Iranian regime on Monday amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in the city of Mashhad, north-east Iran. The state-run Khorasan newspaper identified the victim by his initials as M.T, adding that he was 39 years old. The prisoner was accused of theft and is also serving a 3-year jail sentence. According to Iranian resistance record, there have been more than 2,300 executions since Hassan Rouhani took office as President in 2013. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”
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The U.N.'s Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted Badreddine for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. Since 2011, Badreddine has been running Hezbollah's military operations in Syria, where alongside the Assad regime and its patron Iran, the party of God has waged a campaign of sectarian cleansing, killing hundreds of thousands.
The Weekly Standard added: Thus, for the Islamic Republic, the 55-year-old Badreddine was seen a hero. Zarif, who is seen by the Obama administration as a moderate (!!) relayed to Nasrallah 'that martyrdom of this great commander Mustafa will further strengthen resistance forces against the Zionist and terrorism.'
But according to Iranian opposition press reports, he was visited by Quds Force commander, Qassem Suleimani shortly before he was assassinated.
Badreddine was a major figure in the organization and member of an important Hezbollah family. He was the cousin and brother-in-law, as well as frequent accomplice of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's legendary terrorist mastermind who was assassinated in Damascus in 2008. Mughniyeh's son, and Badreddine's nephew, Jihad, was killed by an Israeli strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in 2015. 'Mustafa Badreddine is the third senior Hezbollah commander of the first generation of Hezbollah cadres to be killed in the last decade. In 1990 after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussain, Badreddine who was awaiting his execution sentence in Kuwaity prison escaped and sought refuge in Iranian embassy and later returned to Lebanon and in the end thousands of Syrian died under his commands. Mustafa Badreddin, with three decades of experience in terrorism, was killed by Israeli airstrike in Syria on Wednesday May 11.
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