The two Iranian the teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, whose executions were spread all across the Internet leading to public outrage on several continents, may not have been killed for being gay as originally reported.
A published article in the New York Blade and its sister publications claim that watchdog organizations have uncovered new information about the circumstances of their hangings.
Research conducted by the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has found, so far, that the teenagers were convicted of and executed for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old male, a crime that occurred when the two teens may have been minors.
Asgari’s lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, told the Associated Press that Iranian courts are supposed to commute death sentences handed to children to five years in jail.
“The judiciary has trampled its own laws,” Razaz Zadeh told AP.
But the lawyer said Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the verdict and allowed the execution despite his objections.It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Accounts of the executions on gay news Web sites referenced reports by the group and its English language news site, www.iranfocus.com.
Gay activists in the U.S. and Great Britain protested to Iranian officials in the U.K. and Canada (the United States broke off relations with Iran and that country has no permanent mission in this country), and some still wonder if Iranian legal officials have trumped up these and other allegations against the two young men to quash public outrage.
Update: Terrance reports on a rebuttal from the British gay activist group Outrage!, calling into question the information in the aforementioned news article. Clearly we may never know the truth about this incident. Hanging still seems to be a most severe punishment for any of the allegations raised thus far.