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According to OutRage magazine …
(The two boys) admitted to having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death. Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.
Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the youngest boy, had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his tender age. But the Supreme Court in Tehran ordered him to be hanged. Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.
WikiNews reports that Iran in Focus “claimed that the two were hanged not for gay sex, but for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy at knife point. Neither the Iranian Student’s News Agency nor another report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran made this allegation.” Direland Press notes that the accusation of rape in reports came days after international outrage and detailed reports by other Iranian news agencies. They suggest the report is a ploy of the Iranian government to justify its actions.
“The allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped-up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths — a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran — or it may be that the 13-year-old was a willing participant but that Iranian law … deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault,” said OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell.
“This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran,” Tatchell remarked. “The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder.”
Tatchell told reporters that according to Iranian human rights activists, more than 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed in Iran since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979.
