Iran | Woman among four more sentenced to death over protests

The Iranian authorities have sentenced to death four more people, including a woman, over protests in January, several rights groups said on April 14.

Iran has already hanged seven people in connection with the protests, which activists say were quelled in a crackdown that left thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested.

Rights groups accuse the Islamic republic of using the death penalty as a tool of repression to instil fear in society, and fear it will ramp up capital punishment in the wake of the war against Israel and the United States.

The four were sentenced to death by a Tehran Revolutionary Court presided over by the notorious judge Imam Afshari after being convicted of carrying out actions on behalf of the US, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency and Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said in separate statements.

They had been accused of throwing concrete blocks at security forces in the capital from a residential building. It was not immediately clear when the verdict was issued.

The four convicted were named as Mohammadreza Majidi-Asl and his wife Bita Hemmati, along with two others, Behrouz Zamaninejad and Kourosh Zamaninejad, who lived in the same Tehran building as the married couple.

Hemmati is believed to be the first woman to be sentenced to death over the protests.

The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said it also believed that Hemmati was the woman who appeared in a video broadcast on state television in January being personally interrogated by judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei.

“The recording and broadcasting of forced confessions from defendants in an opaque process... constitutes a blatant violation of the defendant’s rights,” it said.

Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty said on April 13 in their joint annual report on the death penalty in Iran that at least 1,639 people have been executed in 2025 – including 48 women.

In addition to the seven people who were executed, death sentences have been issued against at least 26 other people arrested over the January protests and several hundred more are facing charges that could see them executed, IHR warned.

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran said: “Dozens of individuals arrested during the January 2026 protests have been sentenced to death following grossly unfair, fast-tracked trials conducted without due process (and) access to independent counsel, and reliance on torture-tainted forced ‘confessions’ as evidence.”

Source: Agence France-Presse, Staff, April 14, 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

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