[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 9



SAUDI ARABIA----execution//female

Ethiopian woman beheaded


An Ethiopian woman was beheaded by the sword on Wednesday in the Red Sea
city of Jeddah for murdering an Egyptian man, said the interior ministry.

Khadija Ibrahim Musa was found guilty of killing Mohammed Abdullah Kamal
Shaheen by stabbing him in the neck while he was asleep and hitting him on
the head with a bottle, it said in a statement carried by SPA state news
agency.

The latest beheading brings to 58 the number of executions announced by
the Saudi government so far this year.

For the whole of 2006, at least 37 people were executed, while 83 were put
to death in 2005 and 35 the year before, according to AFP tallies based on
official statements.

Executions are usually carried out in public in Saudi Arabia, which
applies a strict form of sharia, or Islamic law.

Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry
the death penalty.

(source: Sapa-AFP)






IRAN----execution//female

A woman hanged in Bandar Abbas


A 30 year old women identified as Zahra Nazari was hanged on Monday
afternoon, May 7, in the main prison of southern city of Bandar-Abbas.

The judge ordered that she be executed in public. But, other judicial
authorities opposed the public execution due to extensive public
discontent and pressures on Iran by international humanitarian
organizations to stop executions. Hence, most executions in Iran are
carried out in secret.

According to reliable reports, 50 other prisoners are on death row in
Bandar-Abbas's main prison. 10 people have been executed in Bandar-Abbass
during the past 20 days alone.

(source: National Council of Resistance of Iran)






IRAQ:

They die on Wednesdays: Iraq's women of death row

 Iraqi woman sentenced to hang in killings of 3 relatives

 Woman says she was tortured into confessing a role in the slayings

 New Amnesty International study says many "confessions" are being coerced

 Amnesty, another group are working to commute death sentences of 4 women


Sitting on Iraq's death row is a 25-year-old woman convicted in the
slayings of 3 relatives. She says her husband carried out the killings and
fled. She confessed to being an accomplice, she says, only after being
tortured in police custody.

Despite lingering questions about the case, the fate of Samar Saed
Abdullah remains the gallows.

"I am innocent," she told CNN from inside the al-Kadhimiya Women's Prison
in Baghdad. "The judge did not hear me out. He refused to hear anything I
have to say. He just sentenced me."

According to Amnesty International, such claims are not uncommon in Iraq,
which has the fourth-highest execution rate in the world.

Amnesty issued a report last month that concluded sentences in Iraq are
increasingly following flawed trials and coerced confessions.

"In many cases, death sentences have been issued following proceedings
which failed to meet international fair trial standards," the report said.
"This represents a profoundly retrograde step."

The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority abolished capital punishment
in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. But shortly after the
government was handed over to Iraqis, the death penalty was reinstated in
August 2004.

Since that time, more than 270 people have been sentenced to death, and at
least 100 people -- including Hussein -- have been executed, according to
Amnesty. Four women are currently on death row. 2 of the women have their
young children, ages 1 and 3, with them on death row, Amnesty says.

Tried and convicted in 1 day

Abdullah is among the death-row women.

She is accused of being an accessory to the murder of her uncle, aunt and
cousin -- slayings that were carried out at their family home by her
husband.

In the court documents from her trial, she admitted to confessing she had
gone to her uncle's house with her husband with the intent to steal, but
she says she made that confession as a result of being tortured.

In reaching its verdict, the court disregarded her testimony on the
grounds that her confession was closer to the date of the crime.

She was tried and convicted in a single day, August 15, 2005.

""She didn't confess," her mother, Hana'a Abdul Hakim, told CNN. "It was
from the beating they gave her. She was bleeding. She finally said write
what you want, just stop."

Under Iraqi law, her claim to confessing under torture should have been
investigated, but it wasn't. CNN's repeated queries to the Higher Judicial
Council and the Ministry of Justice went unanswered.

"The judiciary is no longer involved, and nothing can be done unless new
evidence comes to light, which is unlikely," her appeals lawyer, Ali
Azzawi, said.

Father: I wouldn't see her if she was guilty

Inside the prison, Abdullah's voice trembles with fear, her large brown
eyes fill with tears and her hands nervously clench.

"Give me life in prison, 20 years. Anything but this," she said from the
prison's "sewing room."

She holds out hope for an appeal, but she doesn't know that the appeal has
already been rejected. No one -- not even her own family -- has the heart
to tell her the appeals court upheld her death sentence three months ago.

"I couldn't tell her," her mother said. "I was afraid that she would do
something to herself."

Through her tears, the mother's agony is palpable. At this point, she says
she'll take anything for her daughter: life in prison, a lesser sentence.
Anything but the death sentence.

The family says their daughter met her husband, Saif Ali Nur, in the
winter of 2004. They didn't approve of him at first, but eventually gave
the couple their blessing.

3 months later, the mother says, the couple was driving to get gas when
Nur suggested they stop at the uncle's house. They did just that.

Their daughter was in the kitchen washing dishes when, according to the
mother, her husband locked the kitchen door and gunshots rang out. Nur is
alleged to have killed her uncle, aunt and cousin.

Then, the mother says, he held Abdullah at gunpoint demanding to know
where the uncle kept money and gold.

"He dragged her," the mother said. "Samar kept telling him she didn't know
where the money was."

The husband left with less than $1,000 and some jewelry. The next day, he
dumped his wife at the end of her street and threatened to kill her and
the rest of her family if she told authorities, the family said.

Abdullah was arrested by Iraqi police that same day.

The court testimony from her trial mirrors the account the mother told
CNN.

"If I thought she was guilty, I swear, I wouldn't go see her. She would
get the punishment she deserves, but this is such a severe sentence," her
father, Saed Abdul Majid, said.

Every Wednesday is gallows' day

Amnesty International has appealed Iraqi authorities on behalf of Abdullah
and the other 3 women on Iraq's death row. Another group inside Iraq, the
Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, is also seeking to save them.

The group's head, Dalal Rubaie, says they have successfully appealed cases
of 2 women, including one on death row who, she says, confessed after
extensive torture.

"She had her fingernails pulled; she was hung from the ceiling; they took
pictures of her naked while she was hanging; they cuffed her to a bed and
raped her," Rubaie says.

Rubaie's organization delivered a letter from the woman that detailed her
allegations to the government and made it public on the Internet. She is
now awaiting a retrial while her claim is being investigated.

As for Abdullah, she dreads every Wednesday, never knowing if it will be
her last day alive. Wednesday is execution day in Iraq, when inmates are
led unannounced to the gallows.

"I don't sleep at all on Wednesdays," she said. "I stay scared all day."

She survived today, but there's always next Wednesday.

(source: CNN)






PAKISTAN:

Freed Briton Urges Pakistan to End Executions


"Many think I escaped the noose because of my nationality. That may be so,
but if you ask me, I got a new lease of life because God meant me to
live."

It is the same unfaltering faith in God that helped Mirza Tahir Hussain
live through 18 gruelling years behind bars in Pakistani prisons.

A native of Leeds, England, the 36-year old Briton spent half his life
with the death sentence balanced, like the sword of Damocles, over his
head for the murder of a taxi driver. This, he says, was committed in
self-defence. Though found innocent in a criminal court, Hussain was
sentenced to death by the religious Federal Shariat Court in 1988.
Mounting international pressure brought on by his brother's tireless
campaign finally led to his release last year.

"It took nearly two decades to get my brother off death row in Pakistan -
an incredibly draining time during which our family endured emotional
agony," said Mirza Amjad Hussain, who left no stone unturned to gain his
brother's freedom.

6 months after his release, sitting in his home in Leeds, Hussain looks
back on the time he spent in prison. Mired in what he describes as a
judicial system corrupt to the core, he still marvels at how death evaded
him.

"It's a strange convoluted mix of laws - a dangerous hotchpotch of civil
and Islamic law, neither of which is enforced in true spirit or form. It
is the most dangerous tool used at the convenience of the rich and the
influential, not necessarily to provide justice. I should know, I was
acquitted and then sentenced," he says in a long-distance interview
conducted over the Internet.

According to Hussain, instead of acting as a deterrent, the Pakistani
justice system has fanned crimes. "Murders, terrorism and sectarian
killings have increased because it is very easy for actual criminals to
buy their way out to freedom."

He also feels very strongly that violence cannot be resolved by state
violence. "I believe that criminals should be prosecuted and held
accountable, but do they have to be punished with death?" The death
penalty is cruel and unnecessary.

In Pakistan, he says, each criminal case comes with its own price tag with
money exchanging hands at all levels. "If you can pay through your nose,
justice will be on your side."

Little wonder then that Pakistani prisons are filled with a vast
population belonging to the very poorest in society, some of them falsely
accused, he says.

"For criminals belonging to the affluent class and even those from the
middle class, cases are not even registered. And if for some reason they
have been, the victim's family is coerced and threatened till a compromise
is reached."

Hussain adds: "In some cases, in connivance with the police, the case is
made out to be weak. If that fails and the case somehow finds its way into
the court room, huge sums are exchanged to minimise punishment or to turn
a death penalty to a life term." There were healthy people declared
mentally ill by the prison administration so they could "escape the
gallows".

According to a newly-released report by Amnesty International, "nearly 1/3
of the world's 24,000 death row prisoners are in Pakistan".

With inefficient government-appointed defence lawyers, "who are completely
indifferent to their clients' plight" and appalling living conditions,
living on death row in Pakistan "is like living in your grave", says
Hussain.

Death row cells are no bigger than 3.6 metres by 2.7 metres with "between
10 - 12 prisoners crammed together like animals," he says, adding, "we had
to take turns even to sleep".

Because of serious flaws in the judicial system and evidence of
miscarriages of justice, Hussain is deeply concerned over the convictions
handed down in Pakistan. "Like me, many of Pakistan's death row inmates
are innocent or had unfair trials, but unlike me they are likely to meet a
cruel death with no one there to save them. How many innocent lives need
to be taken before capital punishment can be abolished?" he asks.

Amnesty International in its recent report 'The death penalty worldwide:
developments in 2006', singled out Pakistan for its "unfair trials",
together with Iraq and Sudan.

Some of Pakistan's 7,000 death row inmates facing imminent execution are
juvenile prisoners -- despite a 2000 decree banning this, says Hussain. "I
saw them on death row, even after the ban," says Hussain. "Their ages were
conveniently increased by the authorities in connivance with the
magistrate." He says he cannot forget the execution of a 16-year old boy
from a village and who had worked as a labourer. "He was the sole
breadwinner and had been falsely implicated. You cannot fathom the mental
anguish we (other inmates) all went through at his death."

Amnesty International has confirmed that Pakistan executed one child
offender last year. Pakistan had abolished the juvenile death penalty,
"but there had been problems concerning the nationwide compliance with the
law".

Amnesty International places Pakistan 3rd on the list of 25 countries
known to have in total executed at least 1,591 last year. China executed
1,010, Iran 177 and then came Pakistan with 82, Iraq 65, Sudan 65 and the
U.S. 53. These 6 countries, alone account for 91 percent of all executions
carried out worldwide in 2006.

On the eve of the release of the Amnesty International report with these
figures, its director in Britain Kate Allen said: "We urgently need to see
'death penalty governments' issuing bans on all imminent executions,
especially President Musharraf in Pakistan."

(source: IPS News)