On the morning of March 19, three young men—Saleh Mohammadi, 19, Saeed Davoudi, 21, and Mehdi Ghasemi—who were all arrested during the January protests in Iran, were publicly hanged in Qom after being convicted of “waging war against God,” according to the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan News Agency.
The executions followed grossly unfair trials without any semblance of due process, with forced “confessions” obtained under torture.
Dozens of other protesters arrested in January have been handed death sentences by the regime and remain at risk of similar executions, among them children and teenagers. In addition, tens of thousands of detainees from January, and hundreds of individuals arrested during the current war, are at grave risk of fast-tracked trials that could result in more death sentences.
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Saleh Mohammadi, a wrestler who turned 19 in prison on March 11, was sentenced to death by a Qom court on February 4—less than three weeks after his arrest over the alleged killing of a security agent during protests, a charge he denied.
He told the court his “confessions” had been extracted under torture, but the court dismissed his claims and ordered his public execution at the alleged crime scene. A source told Amnesty International that his hands had been fractured from beatings.
A day before, on March 18, another individual, Kouroush Keyvani, a dual Iranian-Swedish national who was arrested during the “12-day war” in June, was hanged on alleged charges of “espionage” for “sending images and information from sensitive locations,” according to the Judiciary’s Mizan News Agency.
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The more extreme the regime gets, the more it says how desperate it is to hold onto power. Hopefully Iranians themselves, and not external powers or zealots, can seize their country and liberate themselves from oppressive regimes, both local and international