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| Hassan Rouhani |
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, 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.
Alireza was instantly taken to Bojnurd's Imam Ali hospital.
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. » | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Wednesday, October 16, 2013
