Iran | Documented Figures Far Below Reality of Protester Killings; “Prison Doctors Instructed Not To Treat Injured Protesters So They’d Die”

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); 19 January 2026: Twenty-three days since the start of the nationwide protests in Iran and twelve days after the internet blackout, information and eyewitness accounts are revealing the scale of the large-scale killing of protesters by state forces. Given the magnitude of these crimes and the severe restrictions on communications, it is not currently possible to publish precise casualty figures in line with the IHRNGO’s standards, which require multi-layered verification and confirmation by at least two independent sources. For this reason, the organisation will refrain from issuing daily statistics until sufficient documentation has been obtained.

In its most recent report, based on documentation received from credible sources, IHRNGO reported the deaths of at least 3,428 protesters. This figure is meaningfully lower than eyewitness accounts and the organisation’s own assessment of the likely true number of fatalities. Estimates published by some media outlets, drawing on information reportedly received from government or hospital sources, indicate that between 5,000 and 20,000 protesters may have been killed. Meanwhile, Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, referred in a speech to “several thousand” deaths, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of Parliament, also spoke of “thousands” killed.

It is important to recall that official sources consistently report figures for state violence that are far below the reality. For example, over the past five years the Islamic Republic has officially announced only an annual average of 12 per cent of the executions that IHRNGO has verified through two independent sources.

IHRNGO continues to document state crimes committed in the suppression of the 2025 protests and urges all citizens and individuals with access to information or evidence that could help clarify the full extent of these crimes to share it with the organisation.

IHRNGO Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: “Information received from eyewitnesses, families and other citizens, together with other available evidence, indicates that the number of protesters killed may exceed even the highest media estimates. There is no doubt that the Islamic Republic has committed one of the largest mass killings of protesters in our time, and all indications are that this massacre was planned and carried out with full coordination. This suggests that these crimes were committed pursuant to a single directive from the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, with the cooperation of the repressive forces, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Accountability for these crimes through the International Criminal Court, and the listing of the IRGC as an international terrorist organisation, must be treated as urgent priorities by the international community. The international community must also take very seriously the threats by Islamic Republic officials to issue and carry out death sentences against protesters, and must act to prevent another large-scale massacre, this time inside prisons.”

According to IHRNGO estimates, around 25,000 people have been arrested in relation to the protests. State media began broadcasting confessions obtained under coercion and torture of protesters within the first week of protests. This is while today, at the Supreme Council of the Judiciary, Mohseni Ejei, Head of the Islamic Republic’s Judiciary, stated that in cases where forced confessions have been aired on state television in recent days and the evidence is “this clear”, with an “explicit confession” on file, proceedings should not be “left pending” and must be dealt with “swiftly.” As IHRNGO has documented in its annual death penalty reports, such confessions are routinely used as the basis for death sentences imposed after unfair trials that lack basic due process guarantees.

At the same time, Ahmadreza Radan, Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Republic’s police forces, said: “We will pursue the rioters and terrorists to the last person. Fortunately, many of them have been arrested. All of them confessed, confessions that included violence, murder and looting, and their cases have been opened and are being processed by the judicial authorities. Many more have been identified and we will go after them one by one and arrest them all.”

Shiraz Central Prison

According to informed IHRNGO sources, a large wave of arrests took place on 7 January in the Maliabad and Farhangian neighbourhoods of Shiraz. The detainees, estimated to be over 1,000, were transferred to unsuitable locations, including the basement of Shiraz Central (Adel Abad) Prison and the adjacent detention facility. Reports confirm that two injured teenagers who had been shot in the Farhangian neighbourhood died in the prison infirmary due to severe blood loss as a result of being denied medical treatment.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “A lot of detainees from the city of Marvdasht have been transferred to Shiraz, and many of them have pellet injuries. There are teenagers aged 16 to 18 amongst them and the physical condition of some of them is shocking. Hossein Ahmadzadeh is one of them. He has lost both eyes and his skull is filled with pellets. Kourosh Fatemi and Omid Farahani, both 16, were shot in the lower back and have been paralysed.”

The source added: “Parsa Rabiei, Mehrdad Khorshidi, Hossein Ramezanpour, Davoud Almasi and Morteza Entekhabi are among the other detained teenagers. The medical situation in the prison is so critical that one of the prison doctors, Dr Jafarzadeh, has been arrested for insisting on treating the wounded, after medical staff were instructed not to treat injured detainees so that they’d die from blood loss.”

IHRNGO sources also emphasised that at least 70 people have been killed in Marvdasht, and efforts to verify the identities of all of them are continuing. According to these reports, Shiraz Central Prison has been placed under an emergency regime for four days in recent days, prisoners have been denied outdoor time, and all telephone lines and visits have been suspended.

Source: Iran Human Rights, Staff, January 19, 2026

"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.

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.

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 executes Daniel Owen Conahan Jr.

In Florida’s 15th execution this year, man put to death for killing linked to ‘Hog Trail Murders’ A Florida man convicted in one of a series of suspected killings that became known as the “Hog Trail Murders” in the 1990s was put to death Thursday, becoming the state’s 15th person executed this year. Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. after receiving a 3-drug lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He had been sentenced to die for the 1996 kidnapping and strangling of Richard Allen Montgomery, whose mutilated body was found in a wooded southwest Florida area where authorities found the remains of at least 6 people over a 3-year span.

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.

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