Iran Says It May Drop Woman’s Stoning Sentence

by William Yong

TEHRAN — Iranian officials said Monday that a woman convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning may now face only a prison sentence for acting as an accessory to the murder of her husband.

Apparently contradicting previous court documents, Zahra Elahian, the head of the Human Rights Committee in Iran’s Parliament and a close ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that the stoning sentence against the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, had never been confirmed. Ms. Ashtiani was convicted of adultery in 2006.

“The stoning sentence has not yet been finalized,” Ms. Elahian wrote in a letter to Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, that was published by Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency. Brazil offered asylum to Ms. Ashtiani last summer after her story gained international attention.

Ms. Elahian said that a death sentence for the murder charge had been suspended with the consent of Ms. Ashtiani’s children. Under the Islamic law of “ghesas,” the family of a murder victim is permitted to spare the guilty party from a death sentence.

“This woman faces only a public sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment,” Ms. Elahian said in the letter.

Later on Monday, a top regional judicial official repeated Ms. Elahian’s statement, telling the official IRNA news agency that the stoning sentence had still “not yet been finalized.”

The official, Malek Azhdar-Sharifi, the head of the East Azerbaijan provincial judiciary, said earlier this month that “anything is possible” in the final outcome of Ms. Ashtiani’s case.

However, there is a continuing conflict between Iran’s judiciary and supporters of President Ahmadinejad — who in the past have tried to present a softer line on high-profile judicial cases — and on Monday a spokesman for the judiciary denied that there had been any significant change in Ms. Ashtiani’s status.

“The case of Sakineh Ashtiani is still in the same phase that it was in before,” the spokesman, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, said in comments reported by IRNA.

“Nothing new has happened,” Mr. Ejei said.

After an international outcry arose as a result of widespread publicity about Ms. Ashtiani’s case, Iranian authorities and official state news media mounted a campaign that emphasized her role as an accessory to the murder of her husband, rather than the adultery conviction.

This month, Ms. Ashtiani appeared at a news conference in the presence of foreign journalists and admitted to complicity in the murder of her husband. She denied that she had been pressured into making a public confession and denounced the protest over her sentence.

Before that, she had appeared in a series of state-produced television programs in which she confessed to her crimes and distanced herself from the international human rights campaign for her.