Death Penalty News

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran has executed a man accused of spying for Israel’s intelligence agency, Tehran's judiciary said on Wednesday. Ehsan Afrashteh, 32, was arrested in 2024 and sentenced to death in 2025 on espionage charges. Mizan Online, which is affiliated with the Iranian judiciary, reported early Wednesday that Afrashteh had been executed. The outlet claimed that he was trained in Nepal by Mossad to work as a spy and had sold “sensitive national information” to Tel Aviv.

Iranian authorities have secretly executed Erfan Shakourzadeh, a 29-year-old political prisoner, satellite technology researcher, and top-ranked aerospace engineering graduate student at Iran University of Science and Technology, at Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj following nearly two years of detention on espionage-related charges. According to information received by Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, the execution was carried out in secret at dawn on Monday, May 11, 2026, at Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj.

The U.S. Justice Department has indicated its intent to pursue the death penalty against Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national accused of fatally shooting one West Virginia National Guard member and seriously wounding another near the White House in late November 2025. WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors said Wednesday they intend to seek the death penalty against Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan national accused of ambushing two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House, killing one and gravely injuring the other. Lakanwal pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Washington to nine federal charges, including first-degree murder, assault with intent to kill and illegal possession of a firearm. The arraignment before Judge Amit Mehta came amid indications from prosecutors that they are working toward "death-eligible charges" — potentially through additional or amended counts — as the case advances.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Defense Department will appeal a military judge's ruling that plea agreements struck by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and two of his co-defendants are valid, a defense official said Saturday. The ruling this past week voided Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's order to throw out the deals and concluded that the plea agreements were valid. The judge granted the three motions to enter guilty pleas and said he would schedule them for a future date to be determined by the military commission.

A former high-level Chinese government employee has been sentenced to death for leaking state secrets to a foreign power, Beijing's spy agency said Wednesday. The individual surnamed Zhang "provided a large number of top secret and classified state secrets to foreign intelligence agencies," the Ministry of State Security said in a post to its official WeChat account. In his job, Zhang had access to "a large number of state secrets", the ministry said.

In Germany, all three consulates general of Iran will be closed in response to the execution of the German-Iranian citizen Jamshid Sharmakhd This was reported by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Tagesschau reports. Iranian consulates will be closed in Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg. The Iranian embassy in Berlin will continue to work. Those of the 32 consulate employees who do not have German citizenship will have to leave Germany.

A Defense Department disagreement over how to bring to justice the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and two others has thrown the cases into disarray. This dispute has surfaced tensions between the desire of some victims' families for a final legal reckoning and the significant obstacles that may make that impossible. Defense lawyers and some legal experts blame many of the endless delays on what they call the "original sin" haunting the military prosecutions: the illegal torture that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants were subjected to in CIA custody. That years-old abuse has snarled the case, leaving lawyers to hash out legal issues two decades later in the now often-forgotten military courtrooms at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke for the first time Tuesday on his decision to throw out a plea deal for the men accused in al-Qaida’s 2001 attacks, saying that the depth of American losses and sacrifice on 9/11 demand that the military commission trial goes ahead.  “This wasn’t a decision that I took lightly,” Austin told reporters at an event with Australian officials in Annapolis, Maryland. “But I have long believed that the families of the victims, our service members, and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commissions, commission trials carried out” in the 9/11 case, he said.

NEW YORK - After Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin canceled plea deals for the alleged 9/11 mastermind and two accomplices, there's mounting pressure for new action.  The trial has been delayed for years. Victims' families and survivors say they want the feds to set a trial date and seek the death penalty.   Beth Murphy was battling melanoma in 2001. For the past 23 years, she's been fighting for justice for her husband Kevin Murphy, who worked on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center. Their children were 4 and 7. "I was battling melanoma. All my lymph nodes were taken out of my right leg. He was crying at my bedside. A week later, he was murdered," Beth Murphy said. 

The US defence secretary has revoked plea deals for the suspects behind the 9/11 attacks, two days after sixteen years of legally fraught prosecution processes reached a conclusion.  Llyod Austin’s announcement has reinstated the possibility of a death penalty for the alleged architect of the attacks on the Twin Towers, according to a memo sent to Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and his accomplices Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi had reached plea deals with the head of the military tribunal in Guntánamo Bay on Wednesday after lawyers had requested that the men receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas.

US prosecutors have reached a deal with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pentagon said Wednesday, reportedly involving a guilty plea in exchange for avoiding a death penalty trial. The agreements with Mohammed and two other accused moves their long-running cases toward resolution. These have been bogged down in pre-trial maneuverings for years while the defendants remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has ruled one of the five defendants charged over the 9/11 attacks is not fit to stand trial in a death-penalty case. The defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, associated psychotic features and a delusional disorder. His lawyer has long claimed his client was "tortured by the CIA". Al-Shibh was scheduled to face pretrial proceedings on Friday. Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base on the eastern tip of Cuba accepted the findings of the doctors which said in August that al-Shibh was too psychologically damaged to defend himself.

Twenty-two years ago [today], the unthinkable happened. Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked and crashed four passenger jets on U.S. soil in a coordinated suicide attack that killed 2,976 men, women and children in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field. The 19 hijackers are long dead. But for 20 years or more, five men accused of conspiring in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks have been in U.S custody – first, for about three years, as “high-value” detainees tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency and its affiliates at secret “black sites” around the world; ever since as prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

The conditions included a presidential guarantee that the five men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks would be spared solitary confinement. WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will not approve conditions proposed by lawyers for 9/11 criminal defendants who are seeking a plea agreement, a National Security Council spokesperson confirmed Wednesday. The rejected terms included a presidential guarantee that the five men would be spared solitary confinement and provided care for the trauma of their torture in CIA custody.

In dismissing a confession in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. has shaken a foundation of U.S. government cases at the post-9/11 court. In late 2006, in an effort to turn the page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration began an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They set up teams of law enforcement officers to try to obtain voluntary confessions from men who had spent years in brutal conditions in isolated C.I.A. prisons.

Plea agreements under consideration may mean that the suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants never face the death penalty WASHINGTON (AP) — The suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants may never face the death penalty under plea agreements now under consideration to bring an end to their more than decadelong prosecution, the Pentagon has advised families of some of the thousands killed.  The notice, made in a letter that was sent to several of the families and obtained by The Associated Press, comes 1 1/2 years after military prosecutors and defense lawyers began exploring a negotiated resolution to the case. 

On August 18, 2023, a military judge in Guantanamo Bay overseeing the pretrial capital prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi national accused of organizing the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, excluded Mr. al-Nishiri’s confessions as the product of torture. “Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” said the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., in a 50-page decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” This decision raises serious questions about the admissibility of confessions made under similar circumstances by the five detainees accused of the 9/11 terror attacks and may affect the plea negotiations currently underway for these men.

The Saudi defendant, accused of orchestrating the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by the C.I.A. in 2002 in a secret prison network. The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Friday threw out confessions the Saudi defendant had made to federal agents at Guantánamo Bay after years of secret imprisonment by the C.I.A., declaring the statements the product of torture. The decision deprives prosecutors of a key piece of evidence against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 58, in the longest-running death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.

The prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others held at Guantanamo Bay has been troubled by repeated delays and legal disputes. WASHINGTON — The suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants may never face the death penalty under plea agreements now under consideration to bring an end to their more than decadelong prosecution, the Pentagon and FBI have advised families of some of the thousands killed. The notice, made in a letter that was sent to several of the families and obtained by The Associated Press, comes 1 ½ years after military prosecutors and defense lawyers began exploring a negotiated resolution to the case.

A group of 227 parliament members in Iran has called on the Judiciary to issue death sentences for people arrested during the ongoing antigovernment protests. The parliament, elected in a non-competitive election in February 2020, is packed with hardliners and Revolutionary Guard officers. In a statement that was read out in the parliament on Sunday, the lawmakers called the protesters ‘mohareb’ -- which literally means warrior in Arabic, but in Islamic law or sharia it means ‘enemy of God’ that carries the death penalty. They also compared the protesters to members of ISIS, who "attack people's lives and property..." The Iranian regime has so far charged several people with ‘moharebeh,’ “corruption on earth,” “assembly and collusion against national security” and “confrontation with the Islamic Republic” for participating in the protests. Describing the current wave of popular protests as “riots,” the MPs claimed that “the US and other enemies” are inciting violence, org...