14 year old Iranian boy flogged to death for breaking Ramadan fast

[Evilmav2]

Religion of peace? Well, at least it's good to see the Mullah judge of the public circuit court of Sanandadj, Iran, is taking his job seriously...


14 year old Iranian boy flogged to death for breaking Ramadan fast

A 14 year old boy died on Thursday, November 11th, after having received 85 lashes; according to the ruling of the Mullah judge of the public circuit court in the town of Sanandadj he was guilty of breaking his fast during the month of Ramadan.

The Kurdish site Rojeh´heh Lât reports that the young man´s identity has not been disclosed. He was scheduled for burial on Saturday, November 13th (after 3 days at the local morgue), in the cemetery of Beheshteh Mohammadi in Sanandadj. However due to the public´s realization of the events surrounding the boy´s circumstances the cemetery was stormed [in protest] and his burial did not take place.

According to informed sources, supervisors have instructed that the burial take place in the presence of his closest relatives, surveyed by security forces.

Link

[dude1394]

Wonder if these are the "rivals" that chris matthews talks about?

[mavsman55]

This is the kind of stuff we are fighting to stop. And it makes it all the more just.

[Drbio]

This disgusts me at so many levels. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img]

[MavKikiNYC]

OTOH....

The Price Paid for Blood on a Child
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Published: November 17, 2004


Darlene Francis and Neville Henry concede they made a mistake. Racing to leave for work while getting their two young children ready for school, they did not pay enough attention when Ms. Francis's 15-year-old son turned up at the family's Bronx apartment on Oct. 5 after being out all night. It was not the first time he had done that, they said.

The boy, Christopher Osbourne, seemed tired. They told him to wash up and "get some rest." But in their rush, they did not notice a small patch of blood on the back of his head. Hours later, he fell into a coma and doctors concluded what the boy could not remember: He had been assaulted.

Ms. Francis, 37, and Mr. Henry, 42, never imagined that their admitted oversight would land them in jail on charges of endangering Christopher's welfare. But it did, beginning a nightmarish passage through the criminal justice system - one that entailed hours of interrogations, handcuffing, a judge's order separating the couple from Christopher and a note from a detective on the boy's hospital bed barring his parents from talking to him.

Yesterday, prosecutors dropped the charges. But the police have yet to solve the mystery of the assault. And while Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry may no longer face prosecution, they have paid a high price, brought on by a case their lawyers say should never have been pursued in the first place.

"It's like a bad dream," Mr. Henry said in his and Ms. Francis's first interview. "You wake up and say, 'It didn't happen.' "

Mr. Henry, an automotive electrician, and Ms. Francis, a home health aide, had never been arrested before and had no history of child abuse or neglect, said the police and an official with the Administration for Children's Services.

On the sunny afternoon of Oct. 4, Christopher headed home from Kennedy High School, where he had been watching a soccer game. The last thing he remembers is getting off a city bus on White Plains Road, one block south of his apartment in the Williamsbridge section. It was about 5:30 p.m.

At sundown, Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry began to worry. But they knew that Christopher often spent the night with the family's relatives and friends. Later that night, when Christopher still had not called, Mr. Henry searched the neighborhood several times and then gave up, assuming he was with an aunt who lives near the high school and has no telephone, he and Ms. Francis said.

The next morning, a neighbor and her son were leaving the building around 7 a.m. when they came upon Christopher face-down on the tile floor at the entrance, said the neighbor, Phyllis McClain. She sent her son to knock on the Ms. Francis's door and then called Christopher's name. "He looked like he just woke up," said Ms. McClain, 39.

Christopher stood up, grabbed the banister and then walked into his apartment, past Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry, who were now standing at the door, Ms. McClain said. When Ms. Francis asked Christopher where he had been, he told her he did not know. She and Mr. Henry assumed he was being evasive.

"I told him, 'Don't even bother thinking about school today; just clean yourself up,' " Mr. Henry said.

The case against Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry would hinge on what happened next, and specifically on what the couple observed about Christopher's appearance.

Four adults who saw the boy that morning - the couple, Ms. McClain and the boy's godmother - gave the same description of him: he smelled faintly of garbage and his clothes were soiled by grass and dirt but had no visible blood stains.

As Christopher sat down at the kitchen table, his mother and stepfather finished getting his two younger brothers, ages 3 and 7, ready for school. The couple, who both work in White Plains and commute together by car, left with the boys around 7:30 a.m. Ms. Francis told Christopher she would call to check on him.

She said she wrestled with the decision to go to work but did not think her new employer would understand if she stayed home. But when she called home from her office, no one answered. At around 11:30 a.m., she called the boy's godmother, Christia Cassis, and asked her to check up on him.

The first thing Christopher remembers was Ms. Cassis trying to wake him from his bed. "She was like shaking me and shaking me and I started to get up," he said recently while sitting on the coach in his living room. Ms. Cassis, 32, became worried when Christopher grabbed his side, as if in pain, she said. When she lifted his gray T-shirt, she saw blood on his undershirt. Soon, she found the patch of blood on his head.

"I got on the cellphone, called Carlene and told her he was hit in the back of the head," she said.

Christopher drifted in and out of consciousness as they rushed to North Central Bronx Hospital in Ms. Cassis's car. When they arrived at the emergency room, Mr. Henry and Ms. Francis were there waiting. Christopher slipped into a coma that afternoon.

The next few days were a blur for the family. The boy was transferred to Montefiore Medical Center in Queens. His mother and stepfather stopped going to work and sat by his bed for hours at a time, they said. The couple first realized that someone may have been questioning their actions on Thursday, Oct. 7, when Detective Tracey O'Connor called the apartment looking for Mr. Henry, who was at the hospital, Ms. Francis said.

While investigating the attack, the police had found blood stains several inches wide on the backs of both the T-shirt and undershirt the boy was wearing. They were believed to have been caused by Christopher's head injury, said Elisa Koenderman, chief of the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Bureau in the Bronx district attorney's office. Prosecutors said they believed the blood was clearly visible to the parents because Mr. Henry told the police he saw blood on the boy's undershirt, Ms. Koenderman said.

Mr. Henry does not recall seeing the blood that morning, or saying he did.

That Thursday, three detectives questioned Mr. Henry and Ms. Francis separately for several hours and suggested that Mr. Henry had committed the beating, the couple said. The police would not comment about any of these interviews. "They started yelling and screaming and putting their fingers in my face - 'You know you did it,' " Mr. Henry said.

Christopher woke up the following weekend. Posted to his bed was a note from Detective O'Connor instructing the nurses not to let Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry talk to the boy if he woke up, they both said. The detective met with Christopher in the next few days, but he only recalled that she asked him how he was feeling, he said.

As Christopher began rehabilitation treatment, meeting with speech and physical therapists, his mother and stepfather were at his beck and call. When he complained about the food, Ms. Francis would bring his favorite home-cooked Jamaican dishes: brown fried chicken, rice and peas, oxtail.

A few days before Halloween, Detective O'Connor called the couple and said they would need to "spend the evening" at the precinct on Oct. 31, they said. They made arrangements for Ms. Francis's mother to care for the children and showed up 15 minutes early for their 9 p.m. appointment.

Mr. Henry was placed inside a cell and Ms. Francis was asked to sit down near the cell, they both recalled. Then an officer handcuffed her right hand to one of the bars of the cell. They stared at each other in disbelief, they said, and stayed silent. "The only thing I said to Carlene is it's going to be O.K., it's going to be O.K.'' Mr. Henry recalled. They sat like that for several hours, and then spent the night in Central Booking. The couple did not know what they had been charged with until they met their court-appointed defense lawyers at the arraignment the next morning. A judge issued an order of protection barring Ms. Francis and Mr. Henry from having contact with Christopher.

An investigator with the public defender's office told Christopher what had happened the next day. "It was like my whole body shut down," Christopher said of his reaction. "I don't even know how I was breathing."

After hearing the news, he decided not to call home, for fear his calls would be traced, he said. He did not speak to his mother and stepfather until a judge dropped the order of protection about a week later.

A key witness, the neighbor Ms. McClain, had stepped forward in that time to give a statement that prosecutors said helped turn the case around. She said that there was no blood visible on the boy's clothing and that he walked unassisted into the apartment, strengthening the argument that the family was unaware of his injuries.

"We looked at this case extremely carefully when the case came in because we wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing," Ms. Koenderman said. Of Mr. Henry, she said, "Ultimately we could not prove that he saw that amount of blood on the shirt at the time the kid came in."

Police Inspector Michael Coan mentioned another account, that of a witness who saw Mr. Henry stepping over Christopher's body in the vestibule that morning. But Ms. Koenderman and the lawyers defending Ms. Francis said they had never heard of this witness, nor was the person mentioned in the complaint.

Christopher is back at home now, though his mother and stepfather do not let him outside alone for fear that someone still wishes him harm. Mr. Henry said his experience with the case had embittered him toward the police. But he said he hoped that whoever was responsible for the assault would finally be arrested.

"If I'm guilty of one thing, it's poor judgment," he said. "And nobody in this lifetime can tell me they never made a mistake."

[FishForLunch]

I thought the MSM is trying to get us idiots to understand that ISLAM is a religion of Peace.

[MavKikiNYC]

Originally posted by: FishForLunch
I thought the MSM is trying to get us idiots to understand that ISLAM is a religion of Peace.

Iran Press News is not exactly MSM, is it?

[Drbio]

Originally posted by: MavKikiNYC

Iran Press News is not exactly MSM, is it?

It is in Iran. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img]