Mahmoud Asgari (), and Ayaz Marhoni (), were Iranian teenagers from the province of Khorasan who were publicly hanged on July 19, 2005. They were executed after being convicted of having raped a 13-year-old boy. The case attracted international media attention and the facts of the case are heavily debated.
Execution
Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed on July 19, 2005, in Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad, northeast Iran, after being convicted by the court of having raped a 13-year-old boy. The case attracted international media attention and the facts of the case are heavily debated.
Shari'a (Islamic Law) in Shiite Iran prescribes the death penalty for homosexual acts but it requires four eyewitnesses to the event, but the Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Iran is a signatory, forbids the execution of juveniles. According to Asgari's lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, "death sentences handed to children by Iranian courts are supposed to be commuted to five years in jail", but the Supreme Court in Tehran upheld the death sentence. The ages of the two remain unclear, with some sources claiming they were fourteen and sixteen at the time of their arrests and sixteen and eighteen when executed, and others claiming that the older boy, Marhoni, was already nineteen, when the alleged crime(s) took place.
Media reports and international reactions
On July 19, 2005, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) posted an article in Persian describing the execution of the two youths. Its headline stated that they had been executed for "lavat beh onf", which means "sodomy/homosexual sex by force" and is a legal term used for rape of men by men. Earlier on the morning of the executions, Quds, the local daily newspaper in Mashhad, published a report on the executions. It gave a detailed account of how the two had raped a 13-year-old boy, and included statements by the father of the rape victim.
The ISNA article became the center of the dispute. The gay-rights group, OutRage!, led by Peter Tatchell, published its own free translation of the article on July 21, suggesting that the two had been executed for engaging in consensual homosexual sex.
Two news sources heavily involved in Iranian exile politics had meanwhile contributed to the spread of the story in English. On July 20, 2005, an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance, the political wing of the People's Mojahedin, released a press release about the executions. It stated that: "The victims were charged with disrupting public order among other things." It did not mention the charges of rape. Iran Focus, a news website that is widely regarded as an affiliate of the People's Mojahedin, also published an article about the hangings, mentioning no charges at all.
On July 22, 2005, Amnesty International issued a news release saying:
"According to reports, they were convicted of sexual assault on a 13-year-old boy and had been detained 14 months ago. Prior to their execution, the two were also given 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft."
On July 27, 2005, after researching reports on the hangings, Human Rights Watch released letters to Iran's president and the head of the judiciary. In writing to the Iranian leadership, Human Rights Watch condemned the use of the death penalty in Iran. It stated that the two "were put to death on July 19 after they were found guilty of sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old boy some fourteen months earlier," but did not address whether those charges were accurate. Its public statement noted:
"Death is an inhumane punishment, particularly for someone under eighteen at the time of his crimes," said Hadi Ghaemi, Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch. "All but a handful of countries forbid such executions. Iran should as well."
In Tehran, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi decried the imposition of the death penalty on minors but did not comment on the nature of the charges in this case.
The first reports in the Iranian media had all identified the hangings as the result of a rape conviction. However, these reports only came to light after later English-language accounts had suggested the two might have been killed for being gay. This made it appear plausible to some that the rape charges might have been simply a "cover story" put out later by the Iranian government—even though the story of rape had actually been the first one told. Several bloggers promoted the story heavily and gave wide coverage to the pictures of the hanging. U.S. blogger Doug Ireland referred to the charges of rape as "the Iranian government's story."