Iran | 7 Arab and Kurdish Prisoners of Conscience Executed in Ahvaz and Karaj

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); October 4, 2025: State media reported the executions of six Arab political prisoners Ali Mojadam, Mohammadreza Moghadam, Adnan Ghabishavi, Moein Khanfari, Habib Deris and Salem Mousavi in Ahvaz, and Kurdish prisoner of conscience Saman Mohammadi Khiareh at undisclosed locations.

According to reports obtained by IHRNGO, the six Arab political prisoners were hanged in Ahvaz Sepidar Prison and Saman Mohammadi Khiareh, in Ghezel Hesar Prison.

Condemning the group hanging of political prisoners in the strongest terms, IHRNGO considers it as part of the Islamic Republic’s ongoing policy of fear and intimidation. The organisation had previously urged the United Nations Fact-Finding Committee to investigate the use of executions for political purposes, including their role in intimidating the public and the scale at which they are carried out, as potential crimes against humanity.

At least 1,042 people were executed in Iran in the first nine months of 2025. In September alone, IHRNGO has recorded 171 executions.

IHRNGO Director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: “None of the seven prisoners executed today by the Islamic Republic were granted a fair trial. These executions are extrajudicial killings for which Ali Khamenei and other officials of the Islamic Republic must be held accountable. All of the prisoners belonged to Kurdish and Arab ethnic minorities, and the authorities tried to lower the political cost of their executions by labelling them as ‘separatists’ or accusing them of ‘collaboration with Israel.’ The people of Iran must raise the cost of such crimes by protesting and reacting more strongly to these executions.”

According to the judiciary’s Mizan News Agency, seven unnamed prisoners of conscience were hanged at unspecified locations on 4 October 2025. Saman Mohammadi Khiareh, a Kurdish minority sentenced to death on charges of “moharebeh (enmity against god) for membership of a dissident group and contact with foreign intelligence services” was one of those executed. He was likely executed in Ghezel Hesar Prison where he was held.

State-run media in Iran reported that he had been arrested on 30 November 2013, but many independent sources say his arrest took place in 2009, when he was 19 years old. At the time of his execution, he was 35 and had spent 16 years in prison.

According to reports, he was sentenced to death by Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by “Death Judge” Abolghassem Salavati, based on torture-tainted confessions.

Mizan’s report did not provide details of the charges or identities of the six other prisoners executed in Khuzestan Province the same day, referring to them only as “members of a separatist terrorist network linked to the Zionist regime”.

They have been identified as Arab political Prisoners Ali Mojadam, Mohammadreza Moghadam, Adnan Ghabishavi, Moein Khanfari, Habib Deris and Salem Mousavi.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Until today, there was no mention of Israel in the charges against these six men. But state news agencies suddenly claimed that they were linked to Israel. These prisoners came from extremely poor families and were denied the right to choose their own lawyers. They were subjected to severe torture — at one point, weights were hung from Ali Mojadam’s testicles, and his wife was arrested, with interrogators threatening to rape her in front of him if he refused to confess.”

Ali Mojadam and Mohamadreza Moghaddam were charged as “leaders of the group’s domestic branch” and all men were sentenced to death for “membership in a baghy group, the armed branch of Harkat Alnezal al-Arabi in Iran with aim of armed rebellion against the Islamic Republic system by the Ahvaz Revolutionary Court in February 2023.

Their torture-tainted confessions were also aired prior to the commencement of legal proceedings and they were previously transferred to the gallows several times.

Source: Iran Human Rights, Staff, October 4, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

Comments

California | Becerra vows to extend moratorium despite past support for capital punishment

SACRAMENTO—Democrat Xavier Becerra defended the death penalty while serving as California’s attorney general, a punishment his office actively sought in the case of a gunman convicted of an Orange County mass shooting, but as the front-running candidate for governor, he has vowed to block executions if elected in November. Becerra said he will extend the blanket reprieve for all death row inmates that Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted by executive order in 2019, saying he supported “moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”

Iran | Afghan Citizen Executed in Wheelchair Due to Severe Mobility Disability

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Iranian authorities have reportedly executed an Afghan citizen, identified as Valijan Nourzay, at the central prison in Rafsanjan, according to the human rights organization Hengaw. Hengaw said in a statement on Sunday, September 6, that Nourzay was executed early Wednesday last week at Rafsanjan Central Prison. According to the organization, Nourzay had a severe mobility disability and was executed while in a wheelchair. Hengaw, citing informed sources, reported that Nourzay had been pursued by Iranian authorities three years ago over an alleged murder. He was reportedly seriously wounded after Iranian security forces opened fire on him in Rafsanjan before being arrested and later sentenced to death.

Egypt TV presenter and 11 others sentenced to death in major drugs case

Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa and 11 others have been sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted of drug trafficking and rape, while nine defendants received life sentences and seven were acquitted. Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa, 39, has been sentenced to death by hanging along with 11 other defendants after being found guilty in a drugs case involving a criminal gang accused of importing ingredients used to manufacture narcotics for sale.

He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola Prison—and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free. Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

Hanging, confinement and the sentencing debate India won’t have

Ask anybody what a “death sentence” in India actually means, and the honest answer is that it can mean three quite different things. It can mean the noose—hanging by the neck until death; it can mean permanent confinement in jail—a term the courts now call imprisonment for the remainder of one’s natural life, and, far more often than either of the first two, it can simply mean delay in delivery of justice—a death sentence that is neither carried out nor commuted, waiting for completion of investigation, trial before the sessions court, hearing of a confirmation proceeding in a high court, appeal against conviction in the Supreme Court, or hearing of a mercy petition nobody has decided for years, sometimes for decades, until age or illness does what the state never got around to doing itself.

California | He spent 19 years on death row. His conversion to Judaism helped him endure

Johnny Morales struggled to find sleep. He dozed off for a few moments, but officers came to his death row cell and woke him a little after midnight. They needed to inventory and box up his belongings. He was leaving San Quentin. Hands cuffed behind his back, he walked across the empty upper yard in the dim gray hours before daylight. An officer walked alongside him step for step, black latex-gloved fingers holding onto Morales’s arm. For almost 20 years, Morales could only experience the world outside his 4-by-11 foot cell in the condemned housing unit like this—chained and escorted by officers. Security protocols required all death row residents be handcuffed or shackled any time they were out in open space with staff.

Arizona AG seeks execution date for man convicted in 1995 trooper killing

Trooper Bob Martin was killed during a traffic stop on the Beeline highway; execution for his killer could be as soon as January PHOENIX (AZFamily)—The Arizona Attorney General is asking for an execution date to be set for a man convicted in the killing of an Arizona State Trooper over 30 years ago. On Aug. 15, 1995, Trooper Bob Martin was shot and killed while performing a traffic stop along the Beeline Highway.

Ex-corrections officials urge governor to commute Kansas death sentences

Former Kansas corrections officials are urging Governor Laura Kelly to grant clemency to the state's death row inmates. Former Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has several reasons why he thinks the state should abolish the death penalty. Werholtz, who served as secretary from 2002 to 2010 and returned on an interim basis in 2019, uses his discussions with peers and family members of victims as well as experiences of seeing wrongly convicted people getting exonerated as his guiding points.

Florida executes Harold Gene Lucas

Florida state officials executed 74-year-old Harold Gene Lucas by lethal injection on Tuesday evening, concluding a 50-year legal saga stemming from the 1976 murder of a 16-year-old girl in Bonita Springs. STARKE, Fla. -- A man convicted of killing a teenage girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends was put to death Tuesday in the first of three executions planned this month in Florida. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, authorities said. He was sentenced to death for the 1976 shooting attack on Jill Piper and the wounding of her friends, Richard Byrd Jr. and Terri Rice.

Florida set to carry out 14th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber

MIAMI (AP) — A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends is set to be executed Tuesday in the first of three lethal injections scheduled this month in the state. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is set to receive a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke starting at 6 p.m. He would be the 14th prisoner put to death this year in Florida, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has already signed death warrants for two more executions set for later this September.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog