A 28-year-old woman who gave birth while on death row was secretly hanged after being convicted of killing her husband, with human rights groups saying her toddler spent two years in prison
A woman who had just given birth in prison while on death row was executed by hanging, it has been claimed. Asma Zarei, 28, was accused of the premeditated murder of her husband.
Zarei, said to be from Parsabad, a city in the far north of Iran, was arrested around three years before her death and sentenced by Iran’s Criminal Court to qisas, an Islamic legal term that literally translates to “retribution-in-kind” or “eye for an eye”. She was hanged at dawn on Wednesday, (May 20) at Ardabil Central Prison in northwestern Iran.
The execution is said to have been carried out in secret and not reported by state-controlled domestic media.
Zarei was reportedly pregnant at the time of her arrest and gave birth while in custody, meaning her child, aged two at the time of her execution, had spent their entire life inside prison. Before her death, she is said to have left a final will requesting her mother raise the toddler, who was reportedly released to the family after the execution.
“Asma was accused of killing her husband through pills,” a source told Iran Human Rights (IHR). “She was pregnant at the time of her arrest and her baby was born in prison.”
The insider further said, according to an official release by the IHR: “That child is now two years old. In the will she wrote before being executed, Asma asked for her mother to raise her child.
“She was transferred to the pre-execution solitary confinement cells a day prior to her execution and was hanged after a last visit with her family.” They continued: “The women’s ward of Ardabil Central Prison currently holds around 80 prisoners, including at least seven other female inmates who have been sentenced to qisas on murder charges.”
Zarei became the sixth woman executed recorded in 2026. In 2025, at least 48 women were executed, the highest number of women executions recorded in Iran in more than two decades, the IHR shared. The NGO, based in Norway, added that Iran executes the highest recorded number of women globally.
There is no publicly available, independently verifiable evidence confirming that Zarei committed the murder she was convicted of, according to international legal and human rights monitors. Campaigners say the extreme secrecy surrounding Iran’s judiciary makes it difficult to scrutinise individual cases.
Zarei’s case was handled behind closed doors, with no public access to proceedings and no media oversight. Moreover, organisations including Amnesty International and Hengaw have documented cases in which convictions rely heavily on confessions they say were extracted under torture, coercion or threats against family members.
Monitors further argue that defendants facing qisas (retribution-in-kind) sentences can struggle to access independent lawyers, challenge forensic evidence such as toxicology findings, or pursue what they consider a meaningful appeal. After conviction, the victim’s relatives must decide whether to demand execution, accept diya (blood money), or grant forgiveness.
IHR says a baseline diya figure is set annually by the judiciary, but there is no legal ceiling on what families may demand, which can leave defendants unable to secure their release. The group says it has documented cases in which people were executed because they could not afford the required payment.
It also claims that when execution is chosen, families are encouraged not only to witness it but to take part in carrying it out.
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