A young Iranian woman convicted of murdering a man she said was trying to rape her was hanged in a Tehran prison on Friday, despite an international campaign for a reprieve.

Open gallery view Facebook page that called against Reyhaneh Jabbari's execution (Screenshot).

Human rights group Amnesty International said Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, was convicted after a deeply flawed investigation, the BBC reported.

Jabbari was arrested in 2007 for the murder of Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran's ministry of intelligence, and sentenced to death in 2009.

She was executed after her relatives failed to gain consent from the victim's family for a reprieve, state news agency Tasnim said on Saturday.

An international campaign calling for a halt to the execution was launched on Facebook and Twitter last month.

Amnesty said that although Jabbari admitted to stabbing Abdolali Sarbandi once in the back, she alleged that he was actually killed by someone else in the house.

Jalal Sarbandi, the victim's eldest son, said Jabbari had refused to identify the man. "Only when her true intentions are exposed and she tells the truth about her accomplice and what really went down will we be prepared to grant mercy," he told the media earlier this year.

Shole Pakravan, Jabbari's mother, confirmed the execution in an interview with the BBC's Persian-language service. She had been allowed to see her daughter for an hour on Friday.