June 1
IRAN:
Iran quashes death sentence for dissident
Iran's Supreme Court has decided to quash a death sentence on dissident
intellectual Hashem Aghajari and will announce the decision shortly, the
Iranian student news agency ISNA reported on Monday.
The agency, which has been well informed on the Aghajari case, did not
provide a source in its report and added that officials in the
hardline-controlled judiciary were so far refusing to confirm the news.
Aghajari, a history professor at Tehran University and a disabled war
veteran, was convicted of blasphemy by a judge in Hamedan in November 2002
for calling for a reformation in Iran's state Shiite Muslim religion.
He also said Muslims were not "monkeys" and should not blindly follow
religious leaders, an assertion that the court saw as a direct challenge
to the Shiite concept of emulation and the status of Irans supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The verdict sparked protests in Iran and abroad,
and Khamenei demanded it be reviewed.
(sourec: Agence France Presse)
INDIA:
Death sentence for Punia's daughter, son-in-law
A local court awarded death sentence to Sonia and Sanjeev, daughter and
son-in-law of former MLA Relu Ram Punia of Barwala, for murdering Sonia's
father and 7 members of the family in August 2001, on Monday.
District and sessions judge Arvind Kumar Goyal, who last week held the
couple guilty of the killings, also imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 each on
both of them. The death penalty is to be confirmed by the high court.
In a gruesome attack on the night of August 24, 2001 , RR Punia, his wife
Krishna , their daughter Priyanka, son Sunil, son's wife Shakuntala and
their three minor children Lokesh, Preeti and Shivani were clubbed to
death with iron rods at their farm house in Litani village in Hisar. Punia
was an Independent member of the Haryana assembly in 1996. He had
organised a birthday party at his farm house a night before the murder.
Later, the police arrested Punia's daughter Sonia who confessed before a
magistrate that she killed her father and and seven other family members
"in a fit of anger" as she claimed that her father did not love her.
Police had also registered a case against her husband Sanjeev and some
other members of his family.
The court on May 27 discharged all members of Sanjeev's family but held
him and Sonia guilty of the killings. Before sending them back to jail,
the police obtained the finger-prints of Sonia and Sanjeev, on Monday. A
large crowd, curious to know the verdict, turned up in the court. The
court has granted one-month period to the guilty to file the appeal.
(source: The Times of India)
