Ahmadinejad uses Virginia execution to embarrass US

The Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has found a neat way to embarrass the US on their own turf. He used an interview yesterday to accuse the west of hypocrisy, asking why there has not been a greater outcry over the planned execution in Virginia of a woman with a mental age of 13.

Displaying one of his not uncommon flashes of media savvy, Ahmadinejad compared the plight of Teresa Lewis with the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman whose death sentence has brought international opprobrium on his country.

Ashtiani's case has become a cause celebre ­ Ahmadinejad claims it has generated 3.7m web pages of protest ­ after it emerged the 43-year-old had been condemned to death by stoning for adultery, even though her husband had already been murdered at the time of the alleged illicit relationship.

Teresa Lewis, meanwhile, is a 42-year-old grandmother of "limited intelligence" who was refused clemency by the US Supreme Court in a two-paragraph judgement on Tuesday night and is now almost certain to die by lethal injection tomorrow. She supposedly instigated the shooting of her husband and stepson - the men who actually pulled the triggers received only life sentences.

The Iranian president is visiting New York for the UN general assembly ­ one of the few chances he gets to play the role of international statesman for the media back home. According to the Times, he used an interview with PBS to complain: "[Teresa Lewis] is to be executed while her physician believes that she was suffering from mental disorder at the time of her husband¹s murder - but nobody pays any attention to this issue."

In a speech to a Muslim audience in New York, he added: "There are 3.7m internet pages about [Ashtiani]. Her case is not yet final but Iran is being heavily attacked. Western media are propaganda agents who continuously speak about democracy and human rights though their slogans are sheer lies."

At first sight, Ahmadinejad may have a point: it is hard not to see Lewis's case as a miscarriage of justice with parallels to that of Ashtiani. Both women are supposed to have had adulterous relationships with their husband's killers, and both have received harsher sentences than the men who did the actual killing.

Amnesty International said both cases were "tragic in their own way". Spokesman Drewery Dyke added: "The best way for this to end would be for Iran to announce that Ashtiani's sentence is to be suspended and for the authorities to decriminalise consensual sexual relations, while in Virginia the state governor should urgently reconsider his decision to deny clemency to Lewis."

But Ahmadinejad's is a false comparison in several ways. Lewis's injection will be an act of barbarism ­ but it will at least be painless. Iranian authorities have now said that Ashtiani may be hanged not stoned, but it is not clear if this is true.

Further, the Iranian president conveniently overlooks the major source of international anger: that Ashtiani was sentenced for adultery, while Lewis's crime is murder.

And it is disingenuous of Ahmadinejad to ask why Lewis's case has been "ignored". It has not: there is a US-based campaign to have her sentence commuted and her case has been covered extensively by US and European media, including The First Post.

Meanwhile, journalists in Iran are not permitted to report on the Ashtiani case. And there remain more than 50 reporters in prison, put there by Ahmadinejad's government, whose serious abuse of human rights is documented beyond question. ·