NCRI – Iran’s fundamentalist regime hanged at least 13 people, including one man in public, on Tuesday.
Six men were hanged collectively in the Central Prison of Urmia (Orumieh), north-west Iran, earlier on Tuesday, May 17. They had been serving a prison sentence in Ward 15 of the jail on drugs-related charges.
They were identified as Naji Keywan, Nader Mohammadi, Ali Shamugardian, Aziz Nouri-Azar, Fereydoon Rashidi and Heidar Amini.
Also on Tuesday, a man was hanged in public in the north-eastern city of Mashhad. (PHOTOS below)
The victim, who was not named, was hanged at 7 am in the city’s Mofatteh Square. His sentence had been upheld by the regime’s Supreme Court.
Separately, the regime’s Prosecutor in Yazd Province told the state-run Rokna news agency that six people were hanged in the central Iranian province on Tuesday. Three of the victims were identified by their initials Ch. R., A. S., and A. B.
Commenting on the hangings, Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, on Tuesday said:
“At least 38 executions since the start of May, including three in public, are of deep concern. That’s to say there’s been one public execution every five days and two people hanged each day in the month of May. Sadly however what adds to our concern is that there has not been an appropriate response by the international community or human rights groups to the appalling state of human rights in Iran.”
The latest hangings bring to at least 89 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and one is believed to have been a juvenile offender.
Iran’s fundamentalist regime last week amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”
Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: “Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before.”
“Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded” in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.
There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”
