TEHRAN, 15 October 2004 — An Iranian man has been sentenced to be executed in public for the killing of 19 kidnap victims, most of them children, while his accomplice in the gruesome murders has been jailed for 15 years, press reports said yesterday.
After just a two-day trial disrupted by distraught relatives of the victims, a judge in Tehran ordered Mohammad Bijeh to be hanged in public after getting 100 lashes.
The judges handed him a total of 16 death sentences, one of which was for sodomy, the afternoon newspaper Kayhan reported.
Bijeh was also ordered to pay blood money to four of the victims’ families, while the government was asked by the judiciary to pay the rest. Blood money stands at 220 million rials ($25,000) for a male, and half that for a female.
Accomplice Ali Baghi escaped the death penalty, receiving a 15-year jail term and 100 lashes for taking part in the kidnappings around the impoverished town of Pakdasht, situated just south of Tehran, and “preparing the conditions for sodomy”.
The trial was abruptly halted on Wednesday after relatives of the victims, 17 of whom were children, made a furious courtroom stampede after Bijeh calmly recounted how he kidnapped, stunned, raped and murdered one of his young victims. He was described by a witness as being “completely calm and free of any remorse”.
After the disturbances, the trial went into a private session and the judge later gave his verdict on Wednesday night. Few other details have emerged from the hearing, which was held behind closed doors.
The prosecution and families of the victims had demanded that both men, dubbed “hyenas” or “vampires of the Tehran desert” in the press, be executed.
The case has drawn huge media attention, with one reader writing to a newspaper asking for the alleged killers — who worked in brickworks — to be burned alive in a brick furnace.
In another development, Russia’s top nuclear authority said yesterday it had finished construction of an atomic power plant in Iran - a project the United States fears Tehran could use to make nuclear arms.
“We’re done. All we need to do now is work out (with the Iranians) the agreement on sending spent fuel back to Russia,” said a spokesman for Russia’s Atomic Energy Agency (RosAtom) in Moscow.
To allay US concerns, Russia has promised not to start up the Bushehr plant in southern Iran until Tehran guarantees to return to Russia all spent nuclear fuel, which can be used in making weapons.
The signing of the document has been delayed repeatedly in past years, raising speculation that Moscow, under severe US pressure to ditch the project, could shelve it until the UN nuclear agency declares Iran’s nuclear program peaceful.
