Iran | 14 Executions in Five Days; Rising Pressures on Political Prisoners, Especially on Women, and Denying Them Medical Treatment
Mehran Qarabaghi, a political prisoner in Shayban prison in Ahvaz, has recently been infected with the coronavirus. His condition is critical, and his life is in danger. The regime, however, refuses to transfer him to the hospital. Other inmates took him to the prison clinic on three different days, but there was neither a doctor nor facilities to treat him. Mehran Qarabaghi, in prison since 2019, suffers from heart and skin disease due to torture and appalling living conditions in prison. The Ministry of Intelligence constantly threatens him with execution if he does not cooperate with the regime against the MEK.
On August 16, Masoumeh Askari, a political prisoner, was almost beaten to death in Fardis Karaj prison by a number of ordinary prisoners hired by the prison warden. She was rescued by other political prisoners. The prison guards have told the prisoners that they will kill Masoumeh. Arrested in February 2020 and sentenced to five years in prison, she is seriously ill. Nevertheless, she is not only denied treatment but also has been harassed continuously by prison guards and hired prisoners after being exiled to Fardis prison in Karaj.
In another development, a Kurdish political prisoner, Saada Khadirzadeh, committed suicide in Urmia prison on Thursday, August 18 due to intense pressure and torture. But she was rescued by her inmates. She was pregnant at the time of her arrest and has a 2-month-old child who is in prison. Prison guards have pressured her to admit that the situation in Urmia prison is good.
Torturing political prisoners is a well-known method of the mullahs’ regime. The Iranian Resistance again calls on the United Nations and human rights advocates to dispatch an international delegation to visit Iran’s prisons, and meet prisoners, especially political prisoners, and take immediate action to save the lives of death row prisoners as well as sick and tortured prisoners.
Frequent Group Executions and Medical Deprivation Raise Death Tolls in Iran’s Prisons
On Sunday, 4 inmates were executed in Arak Prison, where 4 others had already been executed the previous Wednesday. On August 18 and 15, 1 prisoner in Birjand, 1 in Khorramabad, 2 in Shiraz, and 1 prisoner in Sari were executed. 2 additional prisoners were scheduled to be executed in Arak on Sunday but were returned to their cells at the last moment, in keeping with the Iranian regime’s judiciary’s tendency to arbitrarily implement and delay death sentences, creating a pervasive sense of uncertainty that is widely recognized as a form of psychological torture.
Iran has been in the midst of what human rights activists have called a “horrifying wave” and a “spree” of executions. Multiple non-governmental organizations have reached similar conclusions about the present rate of those executions, and although there are slight differences among specific estimates, it is generally understood that the first 6 months of 2022 saw twice as many executions of Iranian citizens as the same period in the previous year.
That trend is very much in keeping with expectations that were described in June 2021 when it became clear that Ebrahim Raisi would be installed as the next president of the Iranian regime. Raisi played a major role in the massacre of over 30,000 political prisoners during the summer of 1988, and since then he has remained a leading advocate for the extensive use of capital and corporal punishment. A spike in the rate of executions was observed even before he was formally inaugurated as president last August, and that rate has generally continued to trend upward over the past year.
By most accounts, the Iranian regime’s judiciary has already well surpassed the milestone of 300 executions for the 1st time, but a precise figure is difficult to ascertain since the judiciary rarely makes official statements about the death sentences it has implemented, and the Iranian regime state media rarely reports or comments upon them. This leads many observers to caution that estimates collected are most likely undercounts.
Even if this were not the case, the number of formally implemented death sentences is not the same as the total number of killings carried out in Iranian prisons. Human rights activists routinely hold regime authorities accountable for deaths caused by systematic mistreatment, denial of access to medical treatment, or any combination of avoidable factors. These problems have naturally accelerated since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the coronavirus continues to present a serious danger to prisoners throughout the country.
Source: ncr-iran.org, Staff, August 20, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde