Iran has executed three men it said were implicated in the deaths of three members of the security forces during anti-government protests, drawing condemnation from rights groups and the EU and risking further international isolation.
Saleh Mirhashemi, Majid Kazemi and Saeed Yaqoubi were executed on Friday morning !
Immediately after their execution on Friday, state media re-ran video posts of what were presented as the defendants’ confessions, which Amnesty International said had been extracted by torture.
The nationwide protests that began last autumn have turned into one of the boldest challenges to the clerical leadership since the 1979 revolution. They were ignited by the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” on 16 September.
On Wednesday, a Twitter account published handwritten notes by the men appealing for public support. “Don’t let them kill us,” read one note, which went viral on social media.
Friends of the families of the men said one of them – Kazemi – had been suspended upside down by interrogators and shown a video of his brother being tortured. Kazemi was also allegedly subjected to mock executions at least 15 times.
At least 582 people were executed in Iran last year, the highest number since 2015 and well above the 333 recorded in 2021, IHR and the Paris-based group Together Against the Death Penalty said in a joint report in April. More than 220 people had already been executed this year, IHR said recently.