Ashtiani allegedly reenacting the murder of her husband for state-run television.
The re-enactment video was part of a 30-minute news program in English that aired Friday night on PressTV, the govern-ment’s English-language news outlet. The fact that the program was done for the English station suggests the government is more concerned about how the woman’s case is seen abroad than in Iran.
The program included interviews with Ashtiani’s imprisoned son, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, and lawyer, Javid Hutan-Kian, as well as photographs of her husband’s seemingly burnt body. It was the first time in Ashtiani’s four television appearances since August that she was seen without a blurred face.
The re-enactment was filmed at her own home in Osku, near Tabriz. Photographs of Ashtiani, 43, at home with her adult son had been released last week, prompting Mina Ahadi, an Iranian human rights activist based in Germany, to announce that it appeared Ashtiani had been released. That was proved wrong the next day.
A few months ago, it was Ahadi who proclaimed that Ashtiani might be hanged the next morning based on a judicial document she had seen. That also proved incorrect.
Press TV said Friday that “a broadcast production team with the Iran-based Press TV has arranged with Iran’s judicial authorities to follow Ashtiani to her house to produce a visual recount of the crime at the murder scene.”
In the film, Ashtiani described how she became the lover of Issa Taheri and then helped him kill her husband in December 2005. With an actor portraying her husband, Ashtiani showed how she gave him an injection to knock him unconscious before Taheri’s entrance with electrical wires. It took several attempts by Taheri to electrocute him. Ashtiani said, “The seventh time my husband didn’t move. He died.”
Prior to the broadcast, Amnesty International said, “It appears that the Iranian authorities are using the Iranian media as a tool to portray her as a dangerous criminal who deserves to be executed.”
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who has been a vocal advocate for Ashtiani’s release, said the video is an “obscenity aimed exclusively at the West.” He accuses Iran of “blackening Sakineh, of demonizing her in order to justify her execution in our eyes.”
Ashtiani was first sentenced to 99 lashes for having illicit relationships with two men after her husband’s death. Later she was convicted of adultery with Taheri before her husband’s death and sentenced to be stoned to death.
After global outrage over the stoning sentence, Iranian officials put that sentence on hold this past July. Only then, did the state proclaim that Ashtiani was guilty of murdering her husband and subject to the death penalty for homicide—but by hanging rather than stoning.
Hardliners appear to be intent on making sure that Ashtiani is executed and that the Islamic Republic does not bow to Western pressures to free her. They appear resigned to conceding on stoning, but not on capital punishment.
But the Islamic Republic’s fervor for executing Ashtiani has produced an opposing fervor in the West. Each action the state takes against Ashtiani seems to generate yet more criticism of Iran in the West.
Laureen Harper, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has in the last month become quite active on behalf of Ashtiani, convening a meeting of Ashtiani backers at the prime minister’s residence in Ottawa last month. In a statement Friday, she said, “I was deeply saddened to learn that Iran is continuing its gross abuse of Ms. Ashtiani’s rights.”
On Monday, more than 80 notable figures from actor Robert De Niro and European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka and Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe published an open letter on the front page of The Times of London calling for Ashtiani’s release.
With all this protest, the re-enactment on Press TV appeared as yet another attempt by the Islamic Republic to justify the execution of Ashtiani.
Nevertheless, such re-enactments are rather common in Europe and Israel, if unknown in North America. When the suspect has already confessed to the crime, “it helps the prosecution solidify the case,” said an Israeli criminal lawyer. “They do it whenever they can.” In many instances, the re-enactment helps in trying to negotiate a reduced sentence for the accused.
Whether that is the situation in Ashtiani’s case is doubtful. Amnesty International emphasized, “International standards for fair trial guarantee the right not to be forced to incriminate oneself or to confess guilt.” In a statement, the deputy director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Program, Philip Luther, said, “If the authorities are seeking to use this ‘confession’ to try to construct a new case against her,… we would condemn this in the strongest terms.”