EXECUTED TWICE: Man Who Survived Execution Will Be Hanged Again

  On an autumnal Wednesday earlier this
month, Alireza, a 37-year-old man jailed
for smuggling drugs and sentenced to death
in Iran, woke up to what was supposed to
be his last day alive.
Outside his cell in Bojnurd prison, in Iran’s
northern Khorasan province, the gallows were
waiting and the countdown had already begun.
Just before sunrise, the guards hooked ropes
around his neck and hanged him for possessing
a kilo of crystal meth. Exactly 12 minutes later
medics pronounced him dead and sent his body
for burial.
But in the morgue the next day, something
unusual caught the eyes of a worker who was
preparing the corpse for family collection:
steam in the plastic cover he was wrapped in.
He was still alive.
Now, to the dismay of his family, Iranian
judicial authorities are waiting for him to make
a full recovery before they hang him again,
according to the state-run Jam-e-Jam
newspaper, which was first to break the news
of Alireza’s ordeal.
Iran’s judiciary has argued that he was
sentenced to death, rather than to hanging,
and should be re-executed. But human rights
activists, already concerned about Iran’s high
rate of executions, say he should be spared.
A nurse told Jam-e-Jam that Alireza’s general
health was satisfactory and he was making
progress day by day. “We couldn’t believe he
was still alive when we went to collect his
body,” a relative told the Iranian newspaper.
“More than anyone, his two daughters are very
happy.”
Mohmmad Erfan, a judge with Iran’s
administrative justice court, told Jam-e-Jam:
“The sentence issued by the revolutionary
court is the death penalty in such
circumstances it should be repeated once
again.”
Alireza, whose surname has not been published
by the Iranian media to protect his identity,
was arrested three years ago for carrying and
possessing Shisheh, an Iranian nickname for
methamphetamine in the form of crystal, which
among many other drugs such as opium is
relatively cheap to buy in the Islamic republic.
A revolutionary court found him guilty and
sentenced him to death.
Under Iranian law, convicts should be conscious
and relatively healthy before execution –
hanging is delayed for people who are pregnant
or in a coma.
When someone is sentenced to death by
stoning in Iran, for instance in adultery cases,
if they manage to climb out of the ground after
being buried up to the neck or somehow
survive the ordeal, their life is spared.
As a neighbour of Afghanistan, a leading
producer and supplier of the world’s drugs,
Iran has high rates of drug use, especially
among its huge number of young people.
Source: Fox News