Victim spares acid attacker in last-minute TV reprieve

An Iranian woman blinded and disfigured by a man who threw acid into her face stood above her attacker yesterday in a hospital operating room as a doctor was about to put several drops of acid in one of his eyes in court-ordered retribution.

The man waited on his knees and wept.

"What do you want to do now?" the doctor asked the 34-year-old woman, whose own face was severely disfigured in the 2004 attack.

"I forgave him, I forgave him," she responded, asking the doctor to spare him at the last minute in a dramatic scene broadcast on Iran's state television.

Ameneh Bahrami lost her sight and suffered horrific burns to her face, scalp and body in the attack, carried out by a man who was angered that she refused his marriage proposal.

"It is best to pardon when you are in a position of power," Ms Bahrami said in explaining her decision yesterday to spare him.

She said the international interest in the case was one reason for deciding to drop her demand for the sentence of retribution to be carried out.

"It seemed like the entire world was waiting to see what we did," she said.

The sobbing man, Majid Movahedi, said Ms Bahrami was "very generous".

It was a dramatic change of heart from around the time when the court handed down the sentence in November 2008. A few months later, Ms Bahrami told a radio station in Spain, where she travelled for medical treatment after the attack, that she was happy with the ruling.

"I am not doing this out of revenge, but rather so that the suffering I went through is not repeated," she said in that March 2009 interview.

The court ruling had allowed Ms Bahrami to have a doctor pour a few drops of the corrosive chemical in one of Movahedi's eyes as retribution based on the Islamic law system of "qisas," or eye-for-an-eye retribution.

Though she was blinded in both eyes, she said in the radio interview that the court ruled she was entitled to blind him in only one eye. After undergoing treatment Ms Bahrami initially recovered 40 per cent of the vision in one eye, but she later lost all her sight.

Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi said Movahedi would remain in jail until a court decides on an alternative punishment.

He said Ms Bahrami has sought financial compensation from her attacker for the cost of treating her injuries. However, a lawyer for Mohavedi has said his family would have great difficulty in finding the amount of money sought by Ms Bahrami.

There have been several other acid attacks on women in Iran. Last week, a young woman died after a man poured acid on her face for rejecting his marriage proposal. Her attacker remains at large.

Amnesty International criticised the Iranian law that allows victims of such attacks to deliberately blind the assailants under medical supervision. In a statement the rights group said the practice was a cruel punishment that amounts to torture.

"The Iranian authorities should review the penal code as a matter of urgency to ensure those who cause intentional serious physical harm, like acid attacks, receive an appropriate punishment - but that must never be a penalty which in itself constitutes torture," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.