Iran executes 3 men over last year’s anti-government protests
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Iran executed on Friday morning three men accused of participating in anti-government protests.
Iran judiciary’s Mizan news agency, announced the executions of Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi, and Saeed Yaghoubi, without saying how they were carried out.
The three men were convicted over the death of two members of the Basij militia affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a police officer during the protests of November last year.
The judiciary announced their execution in a statement on Twitter Friday morning, bringing the number of protesters hanged since the beginning of the nationwide protests that began in September 2022 following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini to at least seven.
Mahsa Amini, 22, who comes from the Kurdish province of Saqez in the predominant Kurdish areas in Iran known otherwise as Eastern Kurdistan, was detained by the morality police at the train station as she was (with her family) on a visit to the capital Tehran, on September 13 in Tehran for “wearing inappropriate clothing.”
With the death of Amini that sparked unprecedented and even unexpected protests neither in Iran nor outside the Islamic Republic, the case has surpassed the death of the Kurdish woman Mahsa (Zhina) Amini who was allegedly killed by morality police. It has become a national one.
The three men were handed down the death sentence in a trial condemned as a travesty of justice by human rights campaigners, who say the prisoners were tortured into confessions, and there is no reliable evidence against them.
Iran remains one of the world’s top executioners, having put to death at least 203 prisoners since the start of 2023, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).
Mahmoud Amiry-Moghaddam, head of the IHR, decried the executions as exposing the “medieval nature” of Iran’s theocracy.
Reporting by John Ahmad
Rights groups say the three were subjected to torture, forced into televised confessions and denied due process.
The protests erupted last September after the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by the country’s morality police for allegedly violating its strict Islamic dress code. The demonstrations rapidly escalated into calls for the overthrow of the theocracy that has ruled Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.