Iran Drops Stoning Sentence of Sakineh Ashtiani

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

Apparently contradicting previous court documents, Zahra Elahian, head of the Majles Human Rights Committee, said that the stoning sentence against the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, had never been confirmed.

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

Mr. Elahian added that a death sentence on the murder charge had been suspended with the consent of her children. This seems to have been done under the Islamic law of “ghesas,” which permits the family of a murder victim to elect to spare the guilty party from a death sentence.

“This woman faces only a public sentence of 10 years imprisonment,” Mr. Elahian wrote in the letter.

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

The official, Malek Azhdar-Sharifi, head of the East Azarbaijan provincial judiciary, had said this month that “anything is possible” with regard to the final outcome of Ms. Ashtiani’s case.

After an international outcry arose following widespread publicity of Ms. Ashtiani’s case, Iranian authorities and official state news media mounted a propaganda 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 while denying she had been pressured into making a public confession. She also denounced the international outcry over her sentence.

Before that, Ms. Ashtiani appeared in a series of state-produced television programs in which she confessed to her crimes and distanced herself from the international campaign that has arisen around her case.

In December, a documentary broadcast by Iran’s English-language Press TV news channel showed Ms. Ashtiani, apparently on a temporary release, reconstructing, step by step, her part in the murder of her husband in her family home.