Taraneh Rahimi confessed to participating in protests that swept Iran in January to prevent her twin sister, Romina, from being raped, as agents at the prison where both were held threatened, their mother Marzieh Nourmohammadi, 43, recounted. The twins were tortured for four months after being detained. The violence was so intense that the two were unrecognizable to their mother during the sentencing hearing, when she learned that Taraneh would be sentenced to death after confessing to participating in the demonstrations. Romina was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The difference between the sentences remains a mystery to the family. A cousin of the twins, Masoud Nourmohammadi, who lives in Utah, United States, told the British newspaper "The Guardian" that he finds it difficult to understand any action of the Iranian regime. According to him, the authorities do not follow the country's own laws.
Masoud stated that there is a legal deadline of 18 days for lawyers to file an appeal, but that in many recent execution cases this did not happen. "They simply ignore," the cousin added, criticizing the arbitrariness of the Iranian judicial system in cases related to the protests.
