Hanged under the cover of war: letters and videos tell stories of Iran’s death row victims | Iran

Writing from his cell in Rajai Shahr prison in the northern Iranian city of Karaj, Babak Alipour wanted to tell his friends about those who had previously gone to execution.

There was Behrouz Ehsani, 69, the elder statesman of the group, who “never got angry” at their plight. There was also Mehdi Hasani, a 48-year-old father of three whom he had seen several times in the prison hospital and who asked him to convey the message to the children that he was “fine”.

Despite the murders, Alipour, a 34-year-old law graduate who has been on death row for three years and is a mountaineering enthusiast, noted in his neat, tight handwriting that he was not afraid.

On March 12, he shot a short video with a phone smuggled into the prison. Regarding Mojtaba Khamenei’s rise to religious leadership after Ali Khamenei’s death in US and Israeli air strikes, Alipour said, “Dictators came, were overthrown, died and were killed; now it is the turn of his son Khamenei’s dictatorship.” Meanwhile, Alipour’s brother Roozbeh, sister Maryam and mother Ommolbanin Dehghan were arrested on their way home from a guard duty outside the prison where he was being held.

Less than two weeks later, on March 31, Alipour was taken to the gallows at Ghezel Hesar prison, a short drive west of where he was being held, where he was hanged along with another cellmate, 32-year-old electrical engineer Pouya Ghobadi. Alipour and Ghobadi, like Hasani and Ehsani, were accused of being part of an armed rebellion and members of the opposition group People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI or MeK). Alipour’s father, a farmer whose former clothing business was disrupted by the recession in Iran’s economy, was unable to recover his son’s remains. According to sources close to the family, there has been no news from Alipour’s brother for a month.

Last month, 16 people were hanged in Iran, including eight political prisoners and eight protesters. There was a brief respite from state killings when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war began on February 28, but after March 18, something changed.

The youngest person to die so far was 18-year-old Amirhossein Hatami, who was hanged on April 2 after giving a statement in which he was said to have coerced a confession to the charges. moharebe (enmity towards Allah) and efsad-fil-arz (Corruption on Earth) Regarding his alleged involvement in the attack on the Revolutionary Guard base in Tehran during the January protests.

The last person executed was Amirali Mirjafari, 24, a student and computer technician killed on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in protests. According to human rights defenders, 11 more political prisoners, aged between 23 and 68, are awaiting execution.

Reza Younesi, 45, is a professor in the chemistry department at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he has lived for twenty years. His brother Ali, 26, an award-winning astronomy student, He was arrested in Iran six years ago, and his father Youssef, 73, was taken from his home three years ago. Both men are serving prison sentences for their alleged links to the MeK. A worrying development occurred a few weeks ago when Younesi’s father disappeared into the prison system and stopped searching for his home.

“For exactly nine days we had no idea, but yesterday he called my mother and he was transferred to the prison where my brother is now,” Younesi said.

The most pressing concern, according to Younesi, is the uncertainty of how the regime will respond as the war continues.

“This looks like the terrible, brutal regime we’ve been talking about,” he said. “Of course, when war breaks out, they become even more brutal. In other words, they can do more or less anything to the prisoners, because they know that the international community, the international human rights organization, cannot do much. Even if they say something, no one is interested.”

Executions are said to be another way to intimidate people in times of danger. “The US will not send any troops on the ground because of the bad experience in Iraq, so this is not a big threat to the regime,” Younesi said. “If some of the senior leaders are killed, the system is still alive and will not collapse. Therefore, the threat to them is the people within the country. They use these sentences and executions as a tool to spread fear in society.”

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based rights group, said the number of political prisoners executed last month was unprecedented. “Normally, most executions are for criminal charges: mainly drugs and murder,” he said. “The purpose of these executions is to create fear among people. The political cost of executing a protester or political prisoner is much higher in normal times. But now everything is overshadowed by war.”

Donald Trump on Thursday claimed he persuaded Tehran not to execute eight women. Iranians denied the White House’s claim that women would die. The US president has yet to publicly comment on the men who died.

Alipour, who is from the city of Amol, 75 miles northeast of Tehran, and dreams of a democratic, secular Iran, reiterated the warning about the regime’s plans under the guise of war in the latest video secretly shot in prison. The convict said, “In the vortex of crisis that has engulfed his entire government, Khamenei wants to display the peak of brutality and oppression by increasing the number of executions in order to create fear and terror in the explosive Iranian society in order to save himself from being overthrown, but he has read blindly.” “Undoubtedly, the day of freedom and happiness of the heroic people of the infidel mullahs will come very soon.”