Hundreds of Iranian activists denounce sharp rise in executions

The explosion caused minor damage estimated at 150 million Iranian rials or about $138 to a metal door and the building's stone facade. No injuries were reported, and public services were not disrupted.

Fallah, currently held in Lakan Prison in the town of Rasht in Gilan province where the incident occurred, was sentenced to death in February by an Islamic revolutionary court. Earlier this week, Iran's Supreme Court rejected his lawyer's appeal.

His lawyer, Milad Panahipour, has condemned the ruling as a "clear violation of proportional justice," arguing that the punishment far exceeds the severity of the alleged offense.

"The court relied on an article in the penal code which penalizes damage to vital public infrastructure. The judiciary building was not classified as a vital facility, and the explosion occurred at midnight when no one was present. This was a small sound firecracker, not a weapon of war," Panahipour said.

'War against God' charge

Fallah was arrested at Rasht Airport in July 2023 and initially sentenced to 15 months in prison of insulting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.

Despite completing that sentence, authorities filed a new case against him with charges of "moharebeh" or war against God, a charge that carries the death penalty.

Reza Akvanian, a human rights activist based in Brussels, criticized the legal basis of the ruling, saying that even under the Islamic Republic's own laws, the charge of moharebeh is unjustified.

"The law clearly defines a mohareb as someone who takes up arms, which Fallah did not do," Akvanian said. "The court's claim that this act qualifies as moharebeh is unprecedented even within Iran's judicial system."

He said that Fallah has denied all charges against him, asserting his innocence.

"These days, they’re once again looking for necks to fit their nooses," US-based activist Masih Alinejad wrote on her Instagram, referring to Fallah's case.

"There’s no proportion between the act and the punishment, but these people see killing a prisoner as a show of power," Alinejad said.

Forced confessions

Throughout the legal proceedings, Fallah was denied access to a lawyer and subjected to coercive interrogation tactics, including threats against family members.

Sources familiar with the cased told Iran International that Fallah had no access to legal counsel during his 18 months in detention. His death sentence was delivered via video conference, raising further concerns about the fairness of the judicial process.

Religious scholars in Qom, the sources added, have been urged to intervene and help overturn the sentence.

While Fallah's case has not yet been highlighted by major international human rights organizations, it reflects broader patterns documented in Iran's judicial system.

According to Iran Human Rights and other advocacy groups, more than 70 political prisoners currently face confirmed or pending death sentences, while over 100 others are at risk of receiving similar verdicts.

The Iran Human Rights Society called October “the bloodiest month for prisoners since the mass executions of 1988.” The deaths, it said, mostly linked to drug offenses or murder, included several Afghan nationals and were sometimes carried out without notifying families or allowing final visits.

Amnesty International on October 16 also urged an immediate halt to executions, saying more than 1,000 had been recorded so far in 2025, many following unfair trials aimed at silencing dissent and persecuting minorities.

Alinejad said the hearing would take place in Manhattan on Wednesday and that she planned to appear in person.

She said she would come “face-to-face with the two Russian hitmen sent by Iran’s regime,” adding that she has survived one kidnapping and two assassination plots on US soil.

“I lost my Brooklyn home, my garden, my peace, but not my voice,” she wrote. “Transnational repression is dictatorship without borders. It must end.”

In March, a US jury found Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov guilty on all charges related to a plot to assassinate Alinejad.

The charges against them included murder for hire, firearms possession and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Prosecutors said the convicted men, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, were members of the Russian mob. Their lawyers argued that they were innocent and evidence presented at trial was flawed.

Khalid Mehdiyev, a member of the Thieves in Law gang, said he received orders from the two to kill the journalist who uses her platform to expose the Islamic Republic’s repression.

As a government witness, who has made a deal with prosecutors, Mehdiyev pleaded guilty to attempted murder and gun charges, but Omarav and Amirov stood trial.

Alinejad, who has long criticized Iran’s compulsory hijab laws and its treatment of women, said she will speak at the sentencing not just for herself, but "for every woman who refuses to be afraid.”

In Tehran, many women now walk unveiled. At airport checkpoints, they pass bareheaded—and officers look away. Yet that fragile tolerance evaporates beyond the capital.

In Isfahan, women receive automated text messages accusing them of “improper veiling,” detected by license-plate cameras. In Qom and Mashhad, inspectors visit offices to “remind” employees of the rules.

Inside the state, there is no agreement on how to confront defiance.

President Masoud Pezeshkian concedes that “coercion doesn’t work.” Parliament hard-liners demand new crackdowns. Friday-prayer leaders thunder about moral decay. The country’s morality directorate boasts of “eighty thousand trained field operatives.”

The people, however, have made their choice.

Across Iran’s cities, millions of women walk unveiled—not in protest marches, but in daily, deliberate normalcy. Their quiet defiance has become an act of collective civil resistance, echoing Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat in Montgomery: simple, silent and transformative.

In doing so, Iranian women have written a new, unwritten law.

From street vans to soft surveillance

The morality police of the 2000s were visible, violent and crude. The new version is quieter but no less insidious.

The loud green vans are gone, as are the street scuffles and viral videos of women being dragged away. In their place stands a bureaucratic apparatus: text warnings, sealed storefronts, administrative summonses and digital dossiers.

Three years after the death of Mahsa Amini, the state has returned to where it began—only this time, it wears a digital mask. The danger is deeper because it is diffuse.

But society has moved on. The question is no longer just about the veil; it is about the freedom to choose one’s own life.

The morality police are no longer merely an institution; they are a symbol of a larger confrontation—the logic of control versus the logic of choice.

One seeks to recreate a past that no longer exists. The other insists on claiming a future that has already begun.

In that struggle, victory will not belong to those with the greater machinery of repression, but to those who still possess the will to live free.

Shargh described familiar scenes at public hangings: spectators arriving hours early, jostling for a view, with teenagers and children in tow as a crane and rope are readied.

The report cited legal experts and psychologists as saying that public hangings, though permitted under certain judicial conditions, risk normalizing violence and inflicting long-term psychological harm, particularly on young observers.

The practice declined to zero in 2021 before returning from 2022, with Fars, Khorasan and Kermanshah provinces accounting for the largest share, and smaller numbers in cities including Yasuj, Arak, Ahvaz, Marvdasht and Isfahan, the newspaper reported.

Many events occurred in provincial centers with large populations or cases that drew unusual media attention, the newspaper added.

“Public executions can have broad negative effects on society. They are not deterrents and instead strengthen violent behavior while harming the mental health of children and adolescents,” lawyer Abdolsamad Khorramshahi told the daily.

Under Iran’s judicial principles, executions should ordinarily be conducted out of public view, Khorramshahi noted.

“Article 4 of the Islamic Penal Code allows a public execution only in specific circumstances, when the executing prosecutor proposes it and the prosecutor general approves.”

Repeated exposure to violence in public desensitizes society and fosters imitation, social psychiatrist Amirhossein Jalali Nadoushan told Shargh.

“When violence becomes a spectacle, it seeps into families and daily life,” Jalali said. Public executions can stir what he called “collective anger” -- repressed frustration that surfaces when citizens lack lawful ways to express grievances.

Deterrence needs equity, not spectacle

Severe penalties have not curbed crime despite heavy sentences for drug traffickers, murderers and thieves, jurist and former Central Bar Association chief Ali Najafi Tavana told the daily.

“No country has managed to control delinquency through executions or corporal punishment.”

Punishment, according to him, only works within a framework grounded in meeting basic needs -- work, housing, social security and psychological calm -- and in visible fairness. When poverty, corruption and discrimination persist and elites flaunt privilege, fear of punishment erodes, he added.

Shargh also cited two public executions in July and August -- one in Larestan and one in Golestan -- where onlookers applauded and whistled at the conclusion, stressing the paper’s finding that the display does not reduce violent crime.

Iran’s execution rate surges in 2025

Twenty-eight inmates were executed nationwide on October 22, bringing the total number of executions that month to 280, the Iran Human Rights Society wrote on Wednesday.

The group called October “the bloodiest month for prisoners since the mass executions of 1988.” The deaths, it said, mostly linked to drug offenses or murder, included several Afghan nationals and were sometimes carried out without notifying families or allowing final visits.

Amnesty International on October 16 also urged an immediate halt to executions, saying more than 1,000 had been recorded so far in 2025, many following unfair trials aimed at silencing dissent and persecuting minorities.

“UN Member States must confront the Iranian authorities’ shocking execution spree with the urgency it demands. More than 1,000 people have already been executed in Iran since the beginning of 2025 -- an average of four a day,” Amnesty said.

Hengaw said Javad Naeimi, a resident of Qom and a specialist working at the Natanz site, was hanged at dawn on October 18 in Qom Central Prison “under conditions of total secrecy.”

Iranian state media had earlier reported the execution of an unnamed man for espionage for Israel but did not identify him.

The rights group said Naeimi had been arrested by security forces in February 2024 and sentenced to death after what it described as an opaque judicial process.

It said he was subjected to torture and coerced confessions during interrogation, citing a pattern of forced admissions in Iranian espionage cases.

Iran’s judiciary has not commented publicly on the latest claims.

Earlier reports by the judiciary-linked Mizan news agency said the executed man had “admitted to communicating with Israeli intelligence for personal and professional reasons.”

Hengaw said Naeimi’s burial took place under heavy security at Qom’s Behesht-e Masoumeh cemetery on October 21, and that his family had been warned not to speak publicly about the case.

The execution comes amid an intensified crackdown on alleged Israeli-linked espionage cases following Israel’s June strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

In August, Tehran executed another scientist, Rouzbeh Vadi, for allegedly passing classified information to Mossad, while in September and October several other men were hanged on similar charges.

• 

  Iran hangs nuclear scientist over alleged espionage for Israel’s Mossad

Last month, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran said the country had executed 11 individuals on espionage charges this year, with at least nine carried out after Israel's military strike on Iran on June 13. Saturday's execution brings the total to at least 12.

Rights groups, including Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, have condemned the surge in executions, saying trials for alleged espionage often fail to meet international standards of due process.

Tehran maintains that it is acting within its laws to counter what it calls “organized intelligence infiltration” targeting its nuclear and defense programs.