Alex Ortner

Zeinab Sekaanvand Lokran was only 24 years old when agents of the Islamic regime of Iran raped her for the last time and hanged her. At 15 she was forced into a violent “marriage.” Her sadistic Muslim husband and his brother treated her as a sex slave, brutally abusing and torturing her while raping her. She suffered severe injuries and went to the police and court begging for a divorce due to the inhumane abuse and sexual torture. Her plea was officially rejected twice because Iran’s Islamic laws permit child marriages, wife beatings, and marital rape. When her husband was found with bruises and stab wounds in his brother’s house, the brother—who also had bruises and had called the police—reported that she had arrived earlier that day and started beating her husband and him. He explained how the beating escalated when she grabbed a kitchen knife, stabbed her husband, threw the knife at the scene, and fled. Zeinab was immediately arrested, but her testimony was not taken because women cannot testify in Islamic courts without two supporting witnesses. She said her husband was killed during a fight with his brother. They did not investigate and ignored inconsistencies, such as the direction of the wounds not matching a right-handed girl stabbing after she allegedly fight with two grown men. Instead, they held her in a police station for 20 days, gang-raped and severely beat her until she signed a false confession. In court, she retracted the confession and begged the judge to believe her. They hanged her anyway. While on death row, she became pregnant and her execution was postponed because Islamic law prohibits the execution of a pregnant Muslim woman. In 2018, She gave birth to a stillborn baby; the child had died in her womb from the shock of watching her cellmate being raped and executed. Two days later, with no medical care or psychological support, the Islamic regime upheld the death sentence and hanged her. This was not justice. This was the cold-blooded murder of an innocent girl by a system that treats women as disposable. While Zeinab was raped, tortured, forced to deliver a dead baby, and executed, Western leaders embraced the Islamic regime and ignored all the crimes against humanity committed under the Rule of Islam.