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EUROPE | MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8 |
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Death and a Maiden Can a test of faith save a man sentenced to die in Iran for an affair with an unmarried Muslim woman? By JORDAN BONFANTE /BONN
Hofer, a small-time exporter of German auto parts and importer of Iranian garments, was plunged into this religious and legal nightmare last September at Tehran Airport. The woman, a 26-year-old medical student identified as Vahideh Gassemi, was stopped by police because of her non-Muslim attire. She told the officers that she was waiting for her "fiance." When Hofer arrived to catch his plane, and the couple kissed, both were arrested. As an unmarried Muslim, the woman was sentenced to a lashing. At his trial on Jan. 26, Hofer received the rare but not unprecedented death sentence. Two weeks ago he filed an appeal and now awaits a higher court ruling and the outcome of diplomatic pressure. German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel assailed the sentence as "beyond any understanding, not just in Germany but throughout the world." He appealed to Iran's judiciary to "show humanity and justice," and warned that "there must not be a new shadow" cast on recently improved relations between Bonn and Tehran. But the government in Bonn also proceeded cautiously. Hofer's case is regarded by some as a possible payback for last year's trial in Berlin, in which the assassins of four Iranian exiles in Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in 1992 received life sentences, and the ruling bluntly implicated Tehran's "highest state levels" in the crime. Tehran denies any connection between the two cases. But Munir Ahmed, an Islamic affairs expert at the German-Orient Institute in Hamburg, argues otherwise. "At the Mykonos trial," he points out, "the German government took the position, 'We cannot influence the outcome because our courts are independent.' Now the Iranians are saying the same thing--in practically the same language." Others believe Hofer could be a pawn caught in the rivalry between the old-line mullahs of Ayatullah Ali Khamenei and the new liberals led by President Mohammed Khatami. "Hofer could be a stick in the hands of the hardliners," says Rolf Tophoven, a Mideast expert who was head of the former Institute for Research on Terrorism in Bonn; "a challenge to the new moderates to show them that they, the mullahs, still have old Islamic law in their hands." Hofer's fate may hinge as much on his religious background as any diplomatic pressure. Under Iranian law, a sexual offense by a non-Muslim man with a Muslim woman is far more serious than one committed by a Muslim man. Hofer, who was twice married, claims to have converted to Islam in order to marry his second wife, a Turkish Muslim, from whom he appears to be divorced. One Hamburg friend says he was even circumcised for the conversion. "The interested party claims to be a Muslim," declared Ayatullah Mohammed Yazdi, head of the Iranian judiciary, last week. "We need an inquiry to establish whether he converted to Islam or not, and if he did, whether this conversion was before or after the facts of the case." If Hofer's claim holds, that would truly be religious salvation.
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erman TV viewers have been watching a grainy, brutal piece of
news footage: a smuggled video from Iran showing three convicts,
each inside a shallow pit and each wrapped in a cloth sack,
being stoned to death by a crowd. But this is not just a bit of
journalistic sensationalism. It could be the fate of Helmut
Hofer, a 56-year-old Hamburg businessman convicted of illicit
sexual relations with a Muslim woman and sentenced to death,
possibly by stoning.