According to the judiciary, three men who were given death sentences in connection with last year’s widespread anti-government rallies in Iran were executed by the government. The three were found guilty for their alleged involvement in a shooting attack in Isfahan in November that claimed the lives of three security guards.
According to Amnesty International, their trials were unjust and they may have been tortured. Iranian authorities have executed four more demonstrators since December. According to reports, many more people have received death sentences or capital offence charges.
The men were tortured and coerced to give statements that served as the foundation for the criminal proceedings against them, according to sources who spoke with Amnesty International. According to reports, interrogators threatened to kill Kazemi’s siblings, mock executed him, and showed him a video of them torturing his brother.
Majid Kazemi, 30, Saleh Mirhashemi, 36, and Saeed Yaqoubi, 37, were hanged on Friday. They were detained during riots in the central Iranian city of Isfahan on November 16, during which two Basij paramilitary force members and a police officer were shot dead.
The three guys were being imprisoned at Dastgerd Prison, and in an audio message, Kazemi was heard saying: “I swear to God I am innocent. I didn’t have any weapons on me. They [security forces] kept beating me and ordering me to say this weapon is mine. I told them I would say whatever they wanted, just please leave my family alone.”
Following what activists claimed to be a four-day trial, a Revolutionary Court found Kazemi and the other two men guilty of “enmity against God,” a loosely defined national security crime, and condemned them to death in January.
The Centre for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), located in the US, claims that the accused were deprived of their right to an effective defence, that the prosecution relied on coerced “confessions,” and that the accusation was “riddled with irregularities that reveal this was a politically motivated case.”
According to UN’s sources, at least 209 people had been hanged this year, accused in drug related offences, calling it “an abominable record”.
Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was arrested by morality police in Tehran in September for reportedly wearing her hijab “improperly,” died while in detention, prompting demonstrations to break out across the Islamic Republic. Mahsa was accused of dressing her head covering “improperly”.
