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Protests rocked Iran last fall before being suppressed by the regime.
CNN
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Iran has executed three more men over the latest protests that have rocked the country, the judiciary told Mizan News on Friday.
Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaqoubi were executed in Isfahan, Mizan said. The three were accused of carrying out an attack that killed three security officers in Isfahan in November 2022 during anti-government protests.
The US State Department on Thursday called on Iran to refrain from carrying out the executions, calling the case “sham trials”.
And Amnesty International said the men were “fast-tracked through Iran’s legal system” without due process being observed.
“The use of the death penalty against these men is blatant retaliation against a brave generation of protesters for steadfastly demanding the rights of the Iranian people over the past seven months,” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and the North. Africa said in a statement on Wednesday.
Iran executed at least 582 people last year, a 75% increase on the previous year, according to rights groups, who say the increase reflects an effort by Tehran to “instill fear” among anti-regime protesters.
It was the highest number of executions in the Islamic Republic since 2015, according to a report released last month by the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and the France-based Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) groups.
More than half of the executions last year took place after the protests broke out in September.
The US State Department on Thursday condemned the latest planned executions of Kazemi, Mirhashemi and Yaqoubi.
“The execution of these men, after what have been widely seen as sham trials, would be a violation of human rights and basic dignity in Iran and everywhere,” State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said at a press briefing.
“It is clear from this episode that the Iranian regime has learned nothing from the protests that began with another death, the death of Mahsa Amini last September,” Patel added.
Nationwide protests rocked Iran last fall as decades of bitterness over the regime’s treatment of women and other issues boiled over after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody by the country’s so-called morality police.
Authorities violently suppressed the months-long movement, which had posed one of the biggest domestic threats to Iran’s ruling clerical regime for more than a decade.
