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Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Aug. 24 – A seventeen-year-old musician
in Iran is facing imminent execution in public
after his death sentence was upheld by Iran’s hard-line Supreme Court, a
state-owned daily reported on Wednesday.
The teenage boy, identified by his first name Sina,
was found guilty of murdering another individual after a dispute over
cannabis last October, the daily Etemaad
reported.
Sina told the Islamic court that he suffered from
drug addiction and had gone to a park in Tehran on the day of the incident to
procure some cannabis. He got into a fight with a drug dealer and stabbed him
to death.
The young musician, who teaches wind instruments in Tehran, said that he was under the
influence of drugs at the time of the scuffle and tried to defend himself
after being beaten up badly by the drug dealer.
Drug addiction among teenagers has become a major social crisis in Iran under the rule of radical
Islamic clerics.
The clergy-dominated Supreme Court has been upholding death sentences with
greater frequency since the election in June of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There has
been an unprecedented rise in death sentences passed on minors in the same
period.
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