An Iranian criminal named Yaqub (or Yaghoob) Ali was publicly hanged on this date in 2011, at Kaj Square in Tehran’s tony Sa’adat Abad neighborhood.

Not ten weeks earlier, he had in those same environs perpetrated a grisly public stabbing of his ex’s new boyfriend. The crime outraged Iranians the nation with the wildfire online and TV promulgation of video showing the mauled victim, one Mohammad Reza, helplessly bleeding to death on the street in broad daylight, unaided by any passerby — including two policemen who had witnessed the men’s altercation without intervening.

“The entire country was under shock after the incident,” according to a Tehran journalist. “No-one understands how the wounded man could have been left without assistance for so long. There is a general feeling that the incident is symptomatic of the growing insecurity in the country, especially in Tehran.”

The embedded video and the photo of the execution further down this post are very much Mature Content.

The speedy public hanging accordingly attracted a throng of angry onlookers.

According to an AFP wire story, “Separately, the ISNA news agency said that a convicted drug trafficker, identified only by his initials A.A., was executed in a prison in the town of Shirvan in northeast Iran. No other details were given.”

On this day..

• 546: Croesus
• 1866: Charles Carrington
• 1963: Stanislaw Jaros, twice-failed assassin
• 1945: Robert E. Folkes, the first condemned man to see the Oregon gas chamber
• 1900: Geronimo Parra and Antonio Flores, the last hanged in El Paso
• 1771: Captain David Ferguson, for the murder of his cabin-boy
• 1655: Jane Hopkins, Bermuda's last known witch execution
• 1638: Four Frenchmen in effigy
• 1917: Sub-Lt. Edwin Dyett, shot at dawn
• 1993: Westley Allan Dodd, child molester
• 1527: Felix Manz, the first Anabaptist martyr
• 1463: Not François Villon