"A physician was to drop acid... into the eyes of Majid Movahed... to punish him for throwing acid in the face of Ameneh Bahrami seven years ago."

Bahrami, who was blinded, had insisted on the eye-for-an-eye punishment, under Islamic law:

"However in the last minute, Ameneh changed her mind and asked the proceeding to be halted," the Islamic republic's Fars state news agency reported.

This week marks the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan in the Islamic world, and pardons and commuted sentences commonly occur as a show of compassion leading into the holiday....

The sentence was to be carried out in May 2011, but a court postponed it after Amnesty International protested against it on the grounds of cruelty.

Bahrami forgave her attacker in part for her country, she told state news agency ISNA, "since all other countries were looking to see what we would do."