Iran executes man arrested for murder at age 17

Iran executed a man Wednesday who was arrested for murder at the age of 17, the judiciary said, despite appeals to spare his life by rights groups including Amnesty International.

Arman Abdolali was executed at dawn in Rajai Shahr prison near Tehran, in line with the "qesas" eye-for-an-eye style justice demanded by the victim's family, said the judiciary's Mizan Online website.

Amnesty International had appealed on October 11 for Iran to halt the execution of the 25-year-old who was arrested in 2014 and later convicted of murdering his girlfriend.

The London-based rights group said he had been sentenced to death twice but that the execution was stopped both times following an international outcry.

It said Abdolali had first been sentenced to death in December 2015 after "a grossly unfair trial" by a court that "relied on torture-tainted 'confessions'" following his girlfriend's disappearance the year before.

It said Abdolali was sentenced to death again in 2020 in a retrial, as the court ruled that the teenager was responsible for the acts in the absence of evidence to the contrary, Amnesty reported.

UN human rights experts also appealed to Iran to halt the execution.

"International human rights law unequivocally forbids imposition of the death sentence on anyone under 18 years of age," said the Geneva-based UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In 2020, there were 246 executions in Iran, according to Amnesty International.

Iran has often faced international criticism for executing people convicted of crimes committed when they were minors, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that has been ratified by the Islamic republic.