On Wednesday, February 17th, as Zahra Esmaili was waiting her turn to be hanged in Gohardasht prison, she suffered a massive coronary and died. According to Omid Moradi, her lawyer, after being witness to 16 prisoners hanged before her eyes, and while waiting her own turn, she suffered the fatal heart attack, prison authorities hanged the lifeless body of his client anyway.
“Today, I saw Zahra Esmaili’s death certificate. They claim the cause of death was heart failure,” Omid Moradi noted on February 19, 2021 on his Facebook page.
Zahra Esmaili was hanged at dawn on Wednesday, February 17, 2021, at Gohardasht (a.k.a. Rajaiishahr) Prison in Karaj. She was 42 and had two children.
According to some reports, Zahra Esmaili claimed responsibility for murdering her husband to save her teenage daughter from execution. Alireza Zamani was one of the directors of the Ministry of Intelligence who allegedly abused his wife and children and intended to rape his daughter. He is said to have routinely taken women with whom he had sexual relations, to his family home. Eventually, in 2019, their daughter, with the help of her younger brother, kill their father, with his own handgun.
In his Facebook posting Omid Moradi also added: “Alireza Zamani’s mother, Fatemeh Assaal-Maahi, brought a stool and sat and watched for a while, gloating while her daughter-in-law’s body was hanging.”
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi said: “Even the judicial authorities knew that she took the rap for the murder of her husband, who was a corrupt intelligence officer, only to save her teenage daughter from execution.”
Zahra Esmaili was the 114th woman executed during Rouhani’s tenure as the clerical regime’s president. Iran is the world’s top executioner of women and has the highest rate of per capita executions. At least 28 prisoners, including three women, have been hanged in Iran over the past month.
