Background
On January 3, 2006, Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by a criminal court of the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to Nazanin, as reported in the Iranian daily Etemaad then 17-year-old Nazanin and her 15-year-old niece Sumayeh were in a park in Karaj, west of Tehran when three men started harassing them. The men pushed Nazanin and her niece down on the ground and tried to rape them, and to protect herself, she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand.
According to Nazanin, the girls tried to escape, but the men overtook them, and at this point Nazanin stabbed one of the other men in the chest, which eventually killed him. According to the accounting of the court in the Etemaad newspaper, when the judge asked her why her father had not attended the hearing, she sobbed uncontrollably and yelled at the judge: "I did not want to kill him! I am not at all a bad-doer. Mr. Judge, what do you want to do with me? I am a girl child! How many times do I have to say that I did this to defend myself and my niece?" The final court verdict was death sentence by hanging.
Based on the original Etemaad story, one of the boyfriends recall the story as : "In an instant, three young men approached us in a threatening manner and said some horrible things to us. Then, Mohammad, one of those men, attacked us with a rock. Samieh got off of my motorcycle and approached the men to fight them. Roozbeh and I were both scared, so we got on our motorcycles to flee, and just as we got on our bikes, I saw one of the men on the ground bleeding." No source has reported what independent witnesses said about the encounter. The Etemaad story also reports that at the time of the attack, Nazanin was a runaway who was disowned by her family. However in a phone interview Nazanin's mother showed much concerns about her daughter's fate and clearly pleaded for her daughter's life while crying. In the same interview, Nazanin's mother confirmed that she asked the victim's mother for pardon, but the alleged rapist's mother refused.
Read more about this topic: Nazanin Fatehi
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