Death may have come as a relief to Makwan, who reportedly was tortured into a confession, convicted without any evidence and humiliated as he awaited his execution.
"The only witnesses who had given statements to the intelligence police saying they had been raped by Makwan came into court and repudiated those statements, saying that they had been extracted under torture," the only Iranian journalist to have covered Makwan's case extensively, Mitra Khalatbari of the newspaper Etemade Melli, told this reporter by telephone from Tehran.
Khalatbari, who covered the story for months and courageously agreed to speak on the record to Gay City News, added, "Makwan himself told the judge that his admission to the Intelligence Police that he had had anal sex with one boy in 1999 was also obtained by torture, and that he now denied it and proclaimed his innocence."
Prior to his execution, Makwan engaged in a hunger strike of ten days to protest the physical and psychological torture he'd been subjected to while in custody to make him confess.
"There was no other evidence," Khalatbari, speaking through a translator, told Gay City News.
"The judge did not bother to order medical examinations to see if rape had taken place, nor did he bother to order medical examinations to see if torture of the witnesses had taken place," she continued.
"The judge's verdict of guilty, and his sentence of Makwan to death, was based purely on his personal speculation," she added.
As punishment for his hunger strike, Makwan - after having had his head completely shaved, a grave insult in Iranian culture - was paraded by police through the streets of his home town of Paveh on the back of a donkey, as police permitted passersby to hurl insults and invective at him and pelt him with stones, eggs, and other objects.
Khalatbari said Makwan was executed at a secret location, without prior notification. He never got a chance to say goodbye to his family.
(tip of the cap to Queerty, one of the few gay news sources, online or off, that's bothered to follow Makwan's case)
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