Amirhossein Pourjafar (also stylised as Amir Hossein Pourjafar, 17 December 1999 – 4 January 2018) was an Iranian

juvenile offender A young offender is a young person who has been convicted or cautioned for a criminal offense. Criminal justice systems often deal with young offenders differently from adult offenders, but different countries apply the term "young offender" ...

who was sentenced to death and executed for the 2016 rape and murder of Setayesh Ghoreyshi, a 7-year-old girl from Iran's marginalised Afghan community. Pourjafar was 16 years old at the time of the murder and was executed shortly after his 18th birthday. Pourjafar's execution sparked international outrage and renewed questions about the ethics of the

death penalty Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

Murder of Setayesh Qorayshi

Setayesh Qorayshi ( fa, ستایش قریشی) was a 6-year-old

Afghan Afghan may refer to: *Something of or related to Afghanistan, a country in Southern-Central Asia *Afghans, people or citizens of Afghanistan, typically of any ethnicity ** Afghan (ethnonym), the historic term applied strictly to people of the Pas ...

girl who was raped and then killed by Amirhossein Pourjafar, an

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

ian 16-year-old boy, in 2016. This incident has raised widespread media attention in both Iran and Afghanistan. Many users on social networks, either Iranian or Afghan, condemned the incident and expressed their sympathy with Setayesh's family. After an unsuccessful attempt to burn the corpse in a bathtub full of

acid In computer science, ACID ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a sequ ...

, Pourjafar then called his friend and asked him to help him in fading the corpse. His friend, however, did not help the killer and instead, he informed his own father. His father in turn, called police and then the police arrested Pourjafar.

Legal proceedings

In September 2016, Branch 7 of Criminal Court No. 1 in Tehran handed Pourjafar two death sentences, one for murder in accordance with the

Sharia Sharia (; ar, شريعة, sharīʿa ) is a body of religious law that forms a part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam and is based on the sacred scriptures of Islam, particularly the Quran and the H ...

h legal principle of ''qisas'' and another for rape. He was also sentenced to 74 lashes for mutilating Ghoreyshi's corpse by placing it in a bath of acid after her death. The

Supreme Court A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...

upheld both death sentences in January 2017. Pourjafar had initially scheduled to be executed on 19 October 2017. Iranian law allows the execution of death row inmates who committed their capital offences as minors, but it does not allow the execution of those inmates before they turn 18. Although Pourjafar would have been 17 years, 10 months and 2 days old on 19 October 2017 according to the

Gregorian calendar The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years dif ...

, the Iranian legal system initially did not stay his execution as he would have been of age according to the

Islamic calendar The Hijri calendar ( ar, ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, translit=al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or ...

(19 October 2017 was equivalent to the Islamic date of 29 Muharram 1439, at which point Pourjafar would have been 18 years, 4 months and 20 days old, according to the Islamic calendar.) Ultimately, the execution was called off following pressure from the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

. Assuming Pourjafar had been executed on this date, he would have been the fifth of six juvenile offenders executed in Iran in 2017. Pourjafar's execution was rescheduled to Thursday 4 January 2018, less than three weeks after his 18th birthday. Despite mounting criticism of his death sentence, he was

hanged Hanging is the suspension of a person by a noose or ligature around the neck.Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Hanging as method of execution is unknown, as method of suicide from 1325. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' states that hanging in ...

as scheduled at the gallows in Gohardasht Prison, Tehran at dawn on 4 January 2018.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pourjafar, Amirhossein 1999 births 2018 deaths Iranian murderers of children Executed Iranian people People convicted of murder by Iran Iranian people convicted of child sexual abuse Iranian people convicted of murder Iranian rapists People executed by Iran by hanging Executed juvenile offenders People executed for murder Violence against women in Iran

Murder of Setayesh Qorayshi

Legal proceedings

See also

References