The recent execution of twelve men, for crimes such as rape and violent behavior, caused anger both in Iran and outside. This, according to a post in the Iranian Digg, is the scene of that execution as shown in the national television. I am not able to verify the authenticity of the image, but I will not be surprised if this is in fact a real picture.

Update: The picture is most likely to be authentic. Because it is viewed for more than 1500 times, in the source, and has received 142 comments. There are arguments there as of the relevance of crime and punishment, but to my knowledge no one has argued against the authenticity of the image. As of the poor quality of the picture, it is taken off a TV screen.

Update II: Interview with the men right before the execution, broadcast on the national television (File removed for bandwidth constraints)

On the road to the village. The huge text on the hillside reads “Khameneii! We are there for you!” (also see this).

Iraj Shahbazi traveled to Aghche-kand, the village where Jafar Kiani was recently stoned to death. He writes about his conversations with the villagers about Jafar and the reason he was sentenced to stoning,

I went back to the village. While waiting for a ride to the town, a resident of the village came on his motorcycle. He insisted to give me a ride and told me about the day they stoned him. “We go to our farms for the whole day. When I came back that day, late in the evening, I heard about the stoning. No one knew in prior. They brought him and closed off the place. Then they killed him and took back his body. Everyone knows he was innocent. Because they killed him themselves. They did not tell anyone what his crime was. … Later I talked to a cab driver. He told me “I am not sure what their crime was. I have heard they kidnapped kids and took out their kidneys to sell” [the blogger tries to show that the whole stoning has been carried out so secretive that many even don't know the "crime" was adultery]. Someone else told me “I have no idea why they killed him, but they killed him brutally. He was killed by Basij members”.

The blogger believes that the administration has intentionally spread rumors about Jafar to aggreavate the calls of human right advocates. While I do not agree with him on that, and I think rumors are understandable consequences of a closed society, Iraj has managed to take pictures from the hole, where they stoned him and also the rather huge stones he was killed with. All pictures are from his blog, I have only merged them into fewer number of files. I have also tried to enhance the quality of the pictures. I warn you that bloody stone used to kill a man is not a pleasant scene.

The hole in which he was half-buried (click for more pictures).

Bloody stone used to kill Jafar (click for more pictures)

Iraj finds this bush close the stoning hole.

Title: “Enter Cautiously”, Source: Rooz. Welcome, strangling, stoning and detention.

Azadeh went shopping and sent me home to wash the dishes. When I arrived home, all sweaty, the only thing I did was to sit in front of the air conditioner and to do a “quick” check for comments and emails. That only finished right before Azadeh buzzed. Aside from the fact that it is general knowledge that you turn your machine on to check your emails and end up reading blogs and checking links here and there, I was very outraged when I saw the footage of an execution, just deleted from Youtube because of its graphic nature. So, I posted the video in both English and Persian . The Persian title I chose was “The Allah who is not great“. That was a big mistake, as I found out later.

After I posted the video, and watched it online to make sure everything was fine, my screen went all blue and the Blue Screen of Death came on, with a funny message “dumping memory”. Who pays attention to this, I said to myself and forced the machine off. That was when Windows did not boot anymore, despite all my efforts. So, I ended up reinstalling windows, and getting the horrible message “Hard disk damaged”. So, I also formatted my hard disk. Fortunately, I don’t keep any information on my notebook. So, I did not loose much, rather than music and movies I had downloaded off the Internet.

The story became silly when I started looking for drivers, which to my surprise were not installed by Windows itself. I had a CD-ROM which I was not sure if it was for my notebook, a Dell Inspiron 640m. The CD-ROM calls the model the drivers of which it carries to be “ME051″. Obviously, I did not trust my guts and I thought maybe that’s for Azadeh’s notebook. So, I looked up the service tag in Dell.ca, where I was referred to a page which held drivers of a system called ” Inspiron E1405/640M”. I took some of the drivers and managed to install the basic functionalities. Then, just asking “what if that CD was actually mine”, I started installing what was provided there, and good job! Everythign is now functional.

The moral of the story is, do not mess with people who shout “Allah is Great” and do not even try to think why Dell uses three different numbers for one product.