TEHRAN, Jan 7 (AFP) - An 18-year-old Iranian woman who killed a man she said tried to rape her has been sentenced to death for murder, according to a press report Saturday.

The woman identified only as Nazanin claimed self defence during her trial after she stabbed a man to death in March 2005, the Etemad newspaper reported.

It said Nazanin, who was 17 at the time, had been out with her niece and their boyfriends on a road west of Tehran when two men started harassing them and then tried to rape them after the boyfriends had run away.

"I committed murder to defend myself and my niece, I did not mean to kill him. I did not know what to do because nobody came to help us," the paper quoted her as saying during her trial.

In January 2005, after seven years of legal wrangling, the Iranian judiciary acquitted a woman who killed a senior police officer she said had attempted to rape on the Gulf island of Kish.

The European Union and international human rights groups have been pressuring Iran to stop executing those under age 18, and the UN General Assembly has adopted a non-binding resolution denouncing the practice of executing minors in Iran.

Iran's ultra-conservative judiciary has responded to critics by saying minors are not executed in the Islamic republic. It has also proposed a law that would prohibit the death penalty or flagellation for those who were minors at the time of the crimes.
According to Iranian law, a boy can be executed from the age of 15, and a girl from the age of nine. However, the execution is carried out when the offender is over 18 years old.

The Iranian press reported a disabled man had been executed in public on Friday, the first of the year. At least 81 people were executed in Iran last year, according to an AFP tally based on press reports and witnesses. Amnesty International says at least 159 people were executed in Iran in 2004.

Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, adultery or prostitution, treason and espionage.
hif/sgh/txw