Iran publicly executes two armed robbers for ‘waging war against God’

London: Two men in Iran were publicly executed after they posted a video on YouTube committing an armed robbery.

The pair, Alireza Mafiha and Mohammad Ali Sarvari, was paraded before a crowd of 300 in a public park in Tehran, before being executed for robbery. Amid the howls of grief and rage, a judge recounted their crime and delivered the verdict, that they would be hanged for ‘waging war against God,’ the Daily Mail reports. Sarvari seemed stoical, but the desperate Mafiha broke down and laid his head on the shoulder of a balaclava-clad Iranian police officer who put an arm around his back. Moments later nooses were looped around their necks as a group of women at the front of the crowd begged their captors for forgiveness, but the pleas went unheard. As the sun came up on Sunday morning, the executioners pressed the buttons to trigger their deaths. Mafiha, aged 23, and Sarvari, 20, were raised up by two extending cranes to a height of around 15 feet. They were dead within seconds. The pair had been arrested after posting a video on YouTube in December showing them attacking a man with a machete on a Tehran street. According to the report, it showed four masked men on motorbikes approaching their victim before assaulting him with a machete and taking his bag and jacket. The 37-second clip was later shown on Iranian television and caused outrage in an urban population terrified by rising crime levels, the report added. ANI