 A court in the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia has sentenced a Kurdish woman, Malak Ghorbany, found guilty of committing adultery to death by stoning - a sentence rarely carried out in recent years. The court also sentenced the woman's brother Abu Bakr Ghorbai and husband Mohammad Daneshfar to six years in jail for killing her lover. Stoning death sentences decreased after international pressure on former reformist president Mohammad Khatami contributed to the end of such rulings in the late 1990s. The punishment was however never scrapped from the penal code of the Islamic Republic. The Committee for the defence of human rights of Iranian Kurdistan has issued a statement to save the life of Malak Ghorbani. |