Two Hanged Publicly in Iran

Mail & Guardian Online:

Two men convicted of carrying out a deadly a bomb attack in Iran's restive oil city of Ahvaz were executed in public early on Thursday, state media announced. "People were shouting down with America, Israel and Britain," the reports said, adding that the two men -- Ali Affrawi and Mehdi Navasseri -- were hanged at the scene of their crime, committed last October. Their double bomb attack in a busy shopping area of the city killed six people and injured close to 100 others. READ MORE

Khuzestan province's deputy governor Mohsen Farokh-Nejad has described the pair as "individuals with Wahabi and Salafist tendencies", a reference to hard-line Sunni Muslim ideologies that are violently opposed to the Shi'ite branch of Islam dominant in Iran.

Khuzestan is home to a large community of ethnic minority Arabs and has been plagued by a wave of bombings over the past year.

Tehran has blamed the unrest on London and the British troops based just across the border in southern Iraq, an allegation that Britain has denied. The executions bring to 24 the number of people executed in Iran so far in 2006, according to an AFP tally based on press reports and witnesses.

Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.

Sad news.