IRIB via BBC A broadcast on Iranian television on Wednesday featured an interview with a woman said to be Sakineh Ashtiani, who was sentenced to die by stoning after being convicted of adultery.Updated | 3:36 p.m. Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian woman whose sentence of death by stoning for the crime of adultery has sparked an international campaign to save her, reportedly appeared on state television in Iran on Wednesday night.
Because the woman Iranian television said was Ms. Ashtiani was shown on screen with her face blurred and her words translated from Azeri into Persian, it was impossible to confirm her identity. In the interview, the woman appeared to confess to both playing a role in the murder of her husband and having had an affair with his murderer, Reuters reported.
Ms. Ashtiani, 43, was convicted of adultery in 2006 despite insisting on her innocence.
A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News which includes excerpts from the Iranian television broadcast said to feature Sakineh Ashtiani, who was sentenced to death by stoning.
My colleague William Yong reported from Tehran last week that “Iran appears to be answering international criticism of its handling of the case” by changing its description of Ms. Ashtiani’s crime from adultery to murder.
On Wednesday night, Ms. Ashtiani’s lawyer in Iran, Houtan Kian, told The Guardian that the interview was genuine and had taken place in Tabriz Prison only after his client had been tortured for two days.
“She was severely beaten up and tortured until she accepted to appear in front of camera,” Mr. Kian said. The lawyer added that Ms. Ashtiani’s two children “are completely traumatized” after watching the broadcast.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an American-financed news organization, points out that the report apparently featuring Ms. Ashtiani begins just after the 10-minute mark of a Web video of the broadcast posted on the Iranian news site Tabnak. Here is that segment of the program, which also dwells on the way Ms. Ashtiani’s case has been featured in American and British television news broadcasts:
The BBC posted video from the interview on its Web site and said that it also contained a denunciation of another lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, who was at the center of the campaign to save Ms. Ashtiani until he fled Iran last week.
Mr. Mostafaei had been questioned by Iranian security before disappearing from Tehran in late July, after the arrest of his wife and brother-in-law, as my colleague Sebnem Arsu reported.
According to Reuters, Ms. Ashtiani said of the lawyer who is now in Norway seeking asylum:
Why did you publicize my case? Why did you harm my reputation and dignity? Not all of my relatives and family members knew that I am prison. Why did you do this to me?
After the broadcast, Mr. Mostafaei told Rooz Online, a news site founded by Iranian exiles in France, that the confession was clearly forced:
Everyone knows that when a person’s life is in danger or has been sentenced to execution or stoning, when they sit in front of the cameras and are asked to speak, they are obliged to comply with whatever the person who holds their life in their hands demands and do what that person says.
A representative of the International Committee Against Stoning called the broadcast “toxic propaganda” in a statement.
According to Reuters, Ms. Ashtiani’s description of the prelude to her husband’s murder, translated into Persian by state television, began with the assertion that the man she was convicted of having an affair with first suggested the crime:
“He told me: ‘Let’s kill your husband.’
“I totally could not believe that my husband would be killed. I thought he was joking,” Ms. Ashtiani said. “Later, I found out that killing was his profession. He came and brought all the stuff. He brought electrical devices, plus wire and gloves. Later, he killed my husband by connecting him to the electricity,” she said.
The head of the judiciary of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province told the television show that Ms. Ashtiani had injected an anesthetic into her husband. “After the husband went unconscious, the real murderer killed the victim by connecting electricity to his neck,” he said.
According to The Guardian’s correspondent in Tehran, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Iran’s state television also suggested that international attention over Ms. Ashtiani’s fate was merely “Western propaganda” aimed at forcing Iran to release three American hikers who have been held since last year.