Reza Rasaei, a 34-year-old arrested during the protests exploded in 2022 in Iran for the killing of Mahsa Amini, was hanged this morning in the city of Sahneh, in the province of Kermanshah, in the west of the country. He is the tenth protester sentenced to death and killed by the authorities of the Islamic Republic since the beginning of the protests for the death of the girl of Kurdish origins who died in September two years ago after being arrested for not wearing the veil correctly.
Rasaei, according to what reports Iranian Judiciary News Agency Mizanhad been arrested in November 2022 and sentenced to death last October on charges of killing a member of the Revolutionary Guards during a trial defined “grossly unfair” by Amnesty International. Before his execution, the young man was even denied the chance to meet his family, who were forbidden by the authorities to bury his body in his hometown, imposing his burial in a remote location.
An unfair trial
Rasaei was arrested on 24 November 2022 in Shahriar, Tehran province, by the Iranian police investigation unit (Agahi) and subsequently transferred to a detention centre in Sahneh, where on 18 November a member of the Revolutionary Guards, Colonel Nader Bayrami, was killed during a protest. According to Amnesty International, the young man was subjected to various forms of torture, including electric shocks, suffocation with a plastic bag and beatings, to extract a confession from him.
Later transferred to Dizel Abad prison in Kermanshah province, Rasaei met his lawyer for the first time only at the trial, in which he always professed his innocence and which took place in only three hearings, the last one held on September 21 last year.
Despite the not guilty plea, Amnesty reports, the judges of the second section of the First Provincial Criminal Court admitted into the courtroom as evidence the “confessions” extracted from the young man under torture, completely ignoring the defendant’s complaints of ill-treatment and his retraction. On this basis, on 7 October, the court found Rasaei guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.
According to the verdict, upheld in January by Iran’s Supreme Court, the 34-year-old had contributed to the officer’s death during the protests, for which he was also sentenced to 74 lashes for “disturbing public order”.
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