Parents stop Iran execution at last minute

The execution of a young Iranian killer was stopped by the parents of the teenager he killed , just minutes away from being hung publicly, , media reported on Wednesday.

The killer, only known as Balal, already had the noose around his neck when the victim's family decided to spare his life. The family was expected to push the chair under Balal in a literal application of qisas, the sharia law of retribution. However, without Balal knowing, the victim's mother slapped the convict, while the father pulled the noose off his head, the Guardian reported. 

News of the extraordinary events lit up Twitter on Wednesday evening as a series of gripping photos from the semi-official Iranian Students' News Agency went viral.

At what would have been Balal's execution this week, his family recounted the events that happened in their small town of Royan in Northern Iran more than six years ago when the two young men clashed. 

"My 18-year-old son Abdollah was taking a stroll in the bazaar with his friends when Balal shoved him," said the victim's father, Abdolghani Hosseinzadeh, according to Isna, Iran's semi-official news service. "Abdollah was offended and kicked him but at this time the murderer took an ordinary kitchen knife out of his socks."

Hosseinzadeh said he came to the conclusion that Balal had not intended to kill his son. "Balal was inexperienced and didn't know how to handle a knife. He was naive," he said. 

After their son was killed, it took six years for a court to hand down Bilal's death sentence, and the Hosseinzadeh family deferred the execution several times. Then in a dream three days ago, Abdolghani Hosseinzadeh said his wife saw their son who told her not to retaliate.

Iran has faced increasing criticism from human rights activists for its high rate of executions. Iran executed more people than any other country other than China last year, according to Amnesty International.

Last month, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, criticised Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for failing to improve human rights conditions and said in a report released at a UN Human Rights Council meeting in March that he was alarmed by the sharp rise in executions since Rouhani took office in June 2013.

As of last week, 199 executions are believed to have been carried out in Iran in 2014, according to Amnesty, a rate of almost two a day.

On Monday, Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, urged the country to halt the execution of Reyhaneh Jabbari, an interior designer who was sentenced to death for the killing of Morteza Abdolali Sarbadani, a former employee of the Iranian Intelligency Ministry. 

Jabbari confessed to the murder immediately after her arrest, but did not have a lawyer present at the time, according to an Amnesty plea for action released last week. The 26-year-old has stated that the murder took place in self-defence.