Hanged for a crime that she denied committing didn't leave 26-year-old Iranian woman Reyhaneh Jabbari bitter.

Accused of killing Morteza Abdolah Sarbandi, a former intelligence official who allegedly raped her, Jabbari instead said in a last wish to donate her organs to people who would need it, rather than for her body "to rot in the soil."

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The university-educated interior designer, who was executed on Saturday dawn, also told her mother not to wear black as a sign of mourning.

"I wish I could have hugged you until I died," The Australian quoted her heart-wrenching farewell note.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International (AI) and the UN and U.S. State Department campaigned for clemency, but their appeal fell on deaf ears as the Iranian government went ahead with her execution.

A day before Jabbari's execution, Sholeh Pakravan, her mother, was allowed to see her for one hour and say goodbye to her daughter who was hanged inside a Tehran prison rather that strung from a crane in Iranian streets while relatives wail in grief.

Jabbari had admitted that she stabbed Sarbandi, who asked her to meet him in an empty house in 2007 to ask for ideas on how to decorate his office. He allegedly molested her, but Jabbari, who was 19 then, stabbed him in the back with a penknife, claiming self-defense.

She was arrested, placed in solitary confinement for two months and sentenced to death in 2009 by a criminal court. AI accused Iran of convicting Jabbari despite a flawed investigation, reports BBC.

Jabbari had claimed that even if she stabbed Sarbandi, there was another person in the empty house who killed him. But she refused to identify the man, complained Jalal Sarbandi, the eldest son of the former intelligence official.

"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," BBC quoted the victim's son.

The Sarbandi family refused to forgive Jabbari because of their belief that she was not telling the truth.

The planned execution was postponed in April after the UN gathered 200,000 signatures in an international petition for clemency. Reports said Iranian President Hasan Rowhani "tried" to have Jabbari's sentence commuted, but later suggested executing her in prison rather than in public.

Jabbari is the 369^th prisoner who served her death sentence, although AI reckons a high figure at 700, while the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said from January to June 2014, 400 were executed in the country.

Jabbari, in her voice message to her mother, said if she did not stab Sarbandi, he would have murdered her.

"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 have learnt that I had been raped as well," Jabbari said in the will sent to her mother.

The grieving mother, in a Facebook newsfeed, wrote, "I cannot believe that these bitter and difficult hours are real ... After seven years of pain and suffering, I this how my dear child comes to her end?" 

TagsReyhaneh Jabbari, Morteza Abdolah Sarbandi, Iranian woman hanged