Iran: capital punishment use, on the rise

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According to Amnesty International, Iran has admitted executing 190 people between January and the end of June this year; an additional 130 reported executions have gone unacknowledged. These figures put Iran on course for a record year for capital punishment. In 2010, 252 people were executed, according to official figures, with 300 more also believed to have been killed.

Iran Human Rights, an independent monitoring organisation, claims the true picture is much worse. It says 25 people were hanged in one day – 3 July – in Ghezel Hesar prison in Karaj, west of Tehran. The hangings, supposedly all drug-related, were not reported by official media. The same report said another seven people were hanged the same day in Evin prison in Tehran. It alluded to further uncorroborated mass executions in prisons in Khorasan province in 2010.

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, another independent pressure group, reported last month that 26 inmates of Vakilabad prison in Mashhad were hanged on 15 June. It quoted the Mashhad prosecutor, Mahmoud Zoghi, as admitting “high numbers of executions” over the past two-and-a-half years. Zoghi said the rise was due to a high volume of drug trafficking cases. “The execution statistics are proportionate and foreign media unjustifiably exaggerate in this subject,” he said.

The number of public hangings is also on the increase. Since the start of 2011, up to 13 men have been executed in public, eight of them since 16 April, an Amnesty report this year stated. Iran meanwhile reportedly defied international law by executing two juveniles offenders, in Bandar Abbas on 20 April. Overall, Iran’s execution “average” is running at almost two people per day in 2011, making the regime the world’s number two executioner after China.

via Iran\’s judicial killing spree | Simon Tisdall | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

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• Report: Iran on Pace for Record Year for Capital Punishment (foxnews.com)
• Sixteen Secret Executions in Iranian prison (mehrejavedan.wordpress.com)
• Iran hangs 5 convicts in public (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Regime’s official: Iran’s prisons so congested one cannot “drop a needle to the floor without being obstructed” (mehrejavedan.wordpress.com)

Italy: Muslim destroys the statue of the patron saint of Agrigento in Sicily

Image by eli_chan via Flickr

An immigrant from the Maghreb has entered the sanctuary of Saint Calogero and has destroyed the image of the patron saint, last July 9th.

The church was open for the 7:30 mass, when the immigrant, of North African origins, has entered and gone directly into the sacristy, where the statue of Saint Calogero was. He took it and threw it violently against the wall, destroying it completely.

A believer who was at the church had tried to arrest the immigrant, but was hurt. Four policemen were needed to control the man and then to arrest him.

Saint Calomero, a Greek saint, lived in the city in the Vth century, evangelised Sicily and is much revered in the island. He is always represented as a black man. In fact, the Agrigento’s archbishop has praised him as “an example of integration between people”.

Video (Italian):