An Iranian woman who was hanged at the weekend for killing a man she said tried to rape her has left a heartbreaking final message to her mother.

Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, recorded the message in April and an English translation was this week distributed by Iranian activists, Slate reports.

"I am telling you from the bottom of my heart that I don’t want to have a grave for you to come and mourn there and suffer."

In the message Ms Jabbari said her fate would have been death regardless and asked that her organs be donated.

"That ominous night it was I that should have been killed," she said.

"My body would have been thrown in some corner of the city, and after a few days, the police would have taken you to the coroner’s office to identify my body and there you would also learn that I had been raped as well.

"The murderer would have never been found since we don’t have their wealth and their power. Then you would have continued your life suffering and ashamed, and a few years later you would have died of this suffering and that would have been that.”

She went on to ask her mother one final request.

"My kind mother, dear Sholeh, the one more dear to me than my life, I don’t want to rot under the soil," she said.

"I don’t want my eye or my young heart to turn into dust. Beg so that it is arranged that as soon as I am hanged my heart, kidney, eye, bones and anything that can be transplanted be taken away from my body and given to someone who needs them as a gift.

"I don’t want the recipient know my name, buy me a bouquet, or even pray for me.

"I am telling you from the bottom of my heart that I don’t want to have a grave for you to come and mourn there and suffer.

"I don’t want you to wear black clothing for me. Do your best to forget my difficult days. Give me to the wind to take away."

Amnesty International said in a statement issued late Friday that Jabbari, an interior designer, was due to be executed for the 2007 stabbing of Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi.

She was hanged at dawn on Saturday.

A UN human rights monitor had said the killing of Sarbandi was an act of self-defence after he tried to sexually assault Jabbari, and that her trial in 2009 had been deeply flawed.

Iranian actors and other prominent figures had appealed for a stay of execution, echoing similar calls in the West.

Efforts for clemency had intensified in recent weeks. Jabbari's mother was allowed to visit her for one hour on Friday, Amnesty said, a custom that tends to precede executions in Iran.

According to the United Nations, more than 250 people have been executed in Iran since the beginning of 2014.

- With AAP