Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s recent call for a tough deal with anti-government demonstrations that have been going on for nearly four months, as well as the appointment of former Revolutionary Guards member Ahmad Radan as police chief, prompted the courts to step up death sentences and to hand down increasingly harsh sentences against protesters. So far, the death penalty has been carried out for four young demonstrators while dozens of other people arrested during the demonstrations received the death sentence, including 34-year-old Hassan Firouzi, father of an 18-month-old girl, and the 22-year-old disabled Mansour Dehmardeh. In addition to criticism of the convictions, criticism and doubts have been raised on social media about how protesters are treated in prison, especially after some of them have committed suicide after being released from prison, such as 36-year-old film critic Mohsen Jafarirad . Many lawyers have described the trials as unfair and the verdicts handed down inconsistent with the crimes attributed to the protesters, calling executions after the death sentences unlawful and denouncing torture while in captivity.
Activists released a list with pictures of 16 protesters who, since the beginning of the demonstrations, have died in custody for various reasons including lack of medical care or torture. In other cases, the official explanations for the deaths are different from what the families of the victims reported on social media, as in the case of Mojtaba Ghanaati Khalari, 28, whose body was found near Shiraz a few days after his arrest for having written anti-government slogans on city walls. According to the family, he died after being tortured while according to the official version he committed suicide by ingesting poison. The mother of 17-year-old Nima (Aslan) Shafadoust, who was shot dead during demonstrations in Orumiyeh, said she was pressured to say her son died from a dog bite. Today the judiciary announced that medical student Ghazal (Roksana) Amirikia died from the coronavirus while her friends claim that the girl lost her life because she refused to go to the hospital, fearing arrest, after having received a baton on the head by the police during the demonstrations.
The journalist, and secretary general of the ‘Democratic Front of Iran’, Heshmatollah Tabarzadi is accused of “corruption on earth”, a crime for which the death penalty is foreseen in Iran. His lawyer Mohammad Moghimi made it known, citing a hearing yesterday where Tabarzadi, arrested in recent days, is accused of 20 different crimes. The 63-year-old journalist, a former political prisoner who had denounced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the past, had already been jailed in September during the first days of anti-government protests that erupted in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old who lost her life after being taken into custody by the morality police for not wearing the headscarf properly.
According to the Tehran Journalists Association, out of 70 reporters who have been arrested during demonstrations since September, 30 are still in prison. Among them, some received harsh sentences such as sports journalist Ehsan Pirbornash, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and photojournalist Yalda Moaiery, known worldwide for a photo taken during a demonstration in 2017, who was sentenced to 6 years.
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