DUHOK, Kurdistan Region – A Kurdish man and his two wives, convicted of abducting and murdering two schoolgirls, were hanged last week, the first judicial executions in the Kurdistan Region since a death penalty moratorium in 2008.
The hangings were announced by District Judge Abdulrahman Zebari, who had issued the death sentences in April 2014 at a court in Duhok city.
“The three convicts were hanged shortly after death sentences were signed by the Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani in accordance with protocol,” Zebari said.
The three offenders were convicted for the abduction and murder of two schoolgirls in 2011 and 2012.
Apart from terrorism-related cases, no other death sentence has been carried out since 2008, because President Barzani has imposed a moratorium by refusing to sign the execution orders.
The judge said the president was asked to make an exception and sign the verdicts for the three offenders, due to the gravity of the crime.
They were hanged for the deaths of two 11-year-old girls, Avan Haji and Havin Hasan, who were kidnapped in Zakho before being abused and murdered.
One of the girls was reported missing in November 2011 and the other in March 2012.
The male offender was initially investigated by police in 2012 but was released for lack of evidence, police said.
“It was through one of his wives that we could charge the man again and find evidence,” Captain Nashaat Sulaiman of the Zakho police force, told Rudaw.
“Initially, one of his wives came and complained that the man was beating her but then she revealed the bigger crimes concerning the two girls,” Sulaiman said.
The man was a construction worker and had six children from the two marriages. Both his wives were also charged and sentenced to death “for complicity” and “because of the gravity of the crime,” the verdict read.
Kurdistan’s Supreme Court did not overrule the sentences, despite lawyers’ objections.
“There were growing public demands that we should respond to the cruelty with which the crimes were committed,” the judge said.
The number of inmates on death row in Kurdistan has grown to a record high as authorities continue to maintain a de facto moratorium on death penalty.
In the region’s three provinces, there are now 205 prisoners who have been sentenced to death. The number is higher than in any year since the 1990s, when the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) established its autonomous courts, virtually independent of Iraq’s judiciary.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and UN Special Representative for Iraq Nickolay Mladenov have urged Iraq to impose a moratorium on the death penalty and called on the Kurdistan region to abolish it permanently.
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