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| Public execution in Iran (file photo) |
NCRI – Iran’s fundamentalist regime mass executed on Wednesday 11 prisoners in their twenties, including at least one who is believed to have been a minor at the time of his alleged offence. Another three prisoners were executed on Tuesday.
The 11 victims, all aged between 22 and 25, were hanged en masse at dawn on May 25 in the notorious Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) Prison in Karaj, north-west of Tehran.
Among them was Mehdi Rajai who is believed to have been 16 years old at the time of his alleged crime.
The names of eight of the other prisoners are believed to be Mohsen Agha-Mohammadi, Asghar Azizi, Farhad Bakhshayesh, Iman Fatemi-Pour, Javad Khorsandi, Hossein Mohammadi, Masoud Raghadi, and Khosrow Robat-Dasti.
On Tuesday, May 24, three other prisoners in Karaj’s Qezelhesar Prison were hanged. One of them was identified as Ruhollah Roshangar, a married father of two. All three had been behind bars for the past four years.
Also on Wednesday, the mullahs’ regime informed seven Sunni prisoners in Gohardasht that their execution sentences have been handed down by Branch 28 of the regime’s ‘Revolutionary Court.’
The seven prisoners were identified as Davoud Abdollahi, Qasem Abesteh, Khosrow Besharat, Ayoub Karimi, Anvar Khezri, Farhad Salimi, and Kamran Shikheh. All seven have been behind bars since December 7, 2009.
Iran’s fundamentalist regime has sharply increased its rate of executions, carrying out at least 21 hangings in a 48-hour period last week.
Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, on Wednesday called for an urgent response by the United Nations and foreign governments to the appalling state of human rights in Iran.
“The rising number of mass executions in Iran in recent weeks clearly shows that the regime has in no way decided to change its disgraceful human rights record. Any claim of moderation under Hassan Rouhani is simply a myth. It is high time for the United Nations and human rights organizations to speak out against the brutal executions by the mullahs’ regime and send Iran’s human rights dossier before the UN Security Council,” she said.
The latest hangings bring to at least 112 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and two are believed to have been juvenile offenders.
Iran's fundamentalist regime earlier this month amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”
Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: "Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before."
"Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded" in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.
There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”
Source: NCRI, May 25, 2016