Tehran: Iran’s state TV is reporting that the country’s authorities have executed a wrestler for allegedly murdering a man, despite a plea from US President Donald Trump for leniency.
“The retaliation sentence against Navid Afkari, the killer of Hassan Turkman, was carried out this morning in Adelabad prison in Shiraz,” state TV quoted the chief justice of Fars province, Kazem Mousavi, as saying on Saturday.
Afkari’s case had drawn the attention of a social media campaign that portrayed him and his brothers as victims targeted over participating in protests against Iran’s Shiite theocracy in 2018.
Authorities accused Afkari, 27, of stabbing a water supply company employee in the southern city of Shiraz amid the unrest.
Iran broadcast the wrestler’s televised confession last week. The segment resembled hundreds of other suspected coerced confessions aired in the Islamic Republic over the past decade.
The case revived a demand inside the country for Iran to stop carrying out the death penalty. Even imprisoned Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, herself nearly a month into a hunger strike over conditions at Tehran’s Evin prison amid the coronavirus pandemic, passed word that she supported Afkari.
Earlier, Trump tweeted his own concern about the case.
Read the article by Amir Vahdat in The Sydney Morning Herald.