Iran Hanged 26 People In 10 Days To Create Fear, Rights Group Says
Amid a new wave of popular protests across Iran, the country’s judiciary has hanged at least 26 prisoners in various cities over the past 10 days.
Amid a new wave of popular protests across Iran, the country’s judiciary has hanged at least 26 prisoners in various cities over the past 10 days.
Oslo-based Iran Human Rights reported the spike in executions on Friday, saying that the sudden increase, as several cities in the country are the scene of anti-government protests, shows that the Islamic Republic authorities use the death penalty as a means of creating fear in society.
According to data collected by the right group, at least 26 people, including two women, were executed from May 17 to 27 in 11 Iranian provinces. Seven of the executed men were Baluchi citizens -- an ethnic minority making up five percent of the population -- and were sentenced to death on "drug-related" charges.
Calling for the abolition of the death penalty, Iran Human Rights Director, Mahmoud Amiri-Moghaddam said, “While most of those executed were charged with crimes such as murder and drug offences, the authorities use the death penalty as a political tool. The executions are carried out with the aim of suppressing dissent.”
Earlier in the month, Amnesty International’s annual report on the worldwide use of the death penalty showed Iran as a country with a “disturbing spike” in executions.
The 66-page report, published Tuesday, found Iran executed at least 314 people in 2021, a 28 percent jump from at least 246 in 2020 and the highest figure since 2017. Amnesty said that in Iran “death sentences were disproportionately used against members of ethnic minorities.”
A new video posted on social mediaon Friday shows that tall concrete walls and poles for surveillance cameras are being erected around Khavaran cemetery, southeast of Tehran.
In a statement Friday, Justice-Seekers of Khavaran, a group of families of the victims and survivors of the prison purges, called on authorities to immediately stop more barriers to the resting place of their loved ones, and said they will launch an international campaign to make their voices heard by the international community.
In 1988, an unknown number of executed prisoners were buried in mass and individual graves at Khavaran which had previously been used to bury non-Muslims including Armenian Christians, Hindus and members of the persecuted Baha’i faith.
Authorities have never disclosed the number of those executed in prisons across the country from August 1988 until February 1989. Between 4,500 and 10,000 prisoners are believed to have been killed. Almost all victims were serving prison terms when clerical rulers decided to eliminate them.
Most victims were members or supporters of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) as well as Marxists and other members of other leftists groups.
Justice for Iran, a London-based rights organization, in a tweet on Saturday said restricting access to the site of mass graves allows the Islamic Republic to further destroy evidence of the crimes it has committed. Mass graves are crime scenes and must remain intact until they can be independently investigated to identify the remains of the victims and the sequence of events when the crimes happened, the rights organization said.
In 2018 Justice for Iran published a report on mass graves of political prisoners in various Iranian cities including Khavaran. According to the report, authorities have on numerous occasions tried to destroy evidence of the burials at Khavaran and other places, including by bulldozing the sites.
The unmarked graves in Khavaran were discovered soon after the executions by victims’ relatives who were never told where their loved ones had been buried. At Khavaran they found limbs and partially buried bodies of victims in shallow unmarked mass graves.
The news about the graves soon spread among those in search of the graves of their loved ones and the cemetery itself took the place of graves never found as many who regularly go there have no evidence of their loved one is buried there. Victims’ families call the cemetery “The Flower Garden of Khavaran”.
Despite constant harassment and persecution, Mothers of Khavaran, a group of mothers and families of victims, have fought for over three decades to bring the authorities to reveal the burial places of their loved ones.
In April 2021, members of the prosecuted Baha’i religious community in Tehran were ordered to bury their dead on the site of a mass grave at Khavaran although they said their own allocated site still had plenty of burial space. They were also told that the remains of the executed prisoners had been exhumed.
"This is the latest in a series of criminal attempts over the years by Iran's authorities to destroy mass grave sites of the 1988 prison massacres in a bid to eliminate crucial evidence of crimes against humanity," said Amnesty International's deputy Middle East director, Diana Eltahawy following the Baha’i community’s revelation.
Visiting the underground ‘strategic drone base 313,’ Bagheri also revealed a drone that can be mounted on a helicopter. The Heidar-1’s UAV was reported to have a 200km range and be capable of hitting a target at a maximum speed of 1,000km per hour.
Over 100 drones are kept in the base in the Zagros mountains, including Kaman-22, Kaman-12 and Qods Mohajer, the last an intelligence, surveillance, target-acquisition, and reconnaissance drone capable of carrying four precision-guided munitions. The base is also home to the Ababil-5, which is fitted with Qaem-9 missiles, an Iranian-made version of the air-to-surface United States Hellfire missile.
With drones increasingly deployed in the region – partly due to their low cost – since Israel and the United States introduced them in the 1970s, Bagheri told commanders and engineers in a speech that Iran had to remain vigilant and up-to-date with equipment and tactics. Wednesday’s reported attack on Iran’s Parchin military site has been attributed to an Israeli ‘suicide drone.’
Major-General Abdolrahim Mousavi, the army commander-in-chief of the army, said that Iran’s drones were “the region's most powerful” and its capacity to upgrade them “unstoppable." Military analysts credit Turkey, which has domestic production, as leading the use of drones in the region, while the United Arab Emirate has both its own manufacturing and imports from China.
