Tehran, 23 June (AKI) - A young man who allegedly committed a crime when he was 15 years old is due to be executed in Iran in the next few days.

Salah Ghasseh, 18, will be the second ethnic Kurd youth to be hanged in the past six months at the Sanandaj prison in the area known as Iranian Kurdistan.

Last December, Makwan Moloudzadeh, also an ethnic Kurd, was arrested at age 17 for allegedly having homosexual relations four years earlier. He was hanged last December at the age of 21.

Iran has ratified international treaties including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids capital punishment for underage youth who commit crimes.

In Iran young men are considered to be adults from the age of 14 and young women from the age of eight and a half, and therefore responsible for any crimes that they commit.

There are now 124 prisoners in death row who committed crimes when they were under 18 years of age, say human rights groups.

Amnesty International said in its latest report, that at least 335 people were executed in Iran in 2007, seven of them children.

It said sentences of flogging and amputation continued to be implemented in Iran, and torture and ill-treatment were widespread in prisons and detention centres.

Iran has one of the highest rates of capital punishment in the world. The government insists that it is a deterrence for crime.