Iran executes seven in past week, three of them Kurds
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Iranian officials in five different prisons carried out the death sentences of seven prisoners in the past week as the country continues to dominate total execution numbers internationally. Among those executed were three Kurds, a human rights watchdog reported on Wednesday.
Mawloud Sha-Husseini, from Kurdistan Province’s city of Divandarreh (Diwandara), was arrested in 2014 on charges of dealing drugs and shortly after was convicted and handed a death sentence. Now 29, he has been awaiting the completion of his sentence for the past four years and on Tuesday it was carried out in Isfahan Central Prison, said Iran Human Rights Monitor.
On Sunday, Aslan Shirani, 33, another Kurdish prisoner from the city of West Azerbaijan’s Miandoab city and held in Maragha Prison in East Azerbaijan, was also executed. He was convicted of “premeditated murder” in 2015.
Three days afterward, in Ilam Central Prison, another Kurdish prisoner named Kurosh Behzadian, whose age and place of birth is unclear, was hanged till death six years after he was sentenced on the same charges.
Two other Iranian nationals, Behrooz Ansari-Lanjan and Ayoub Jahandar, were executed in Isfahan Central Prison and South Khorasan’s Ferdaws prison, respectively.
Earlier in the week, local reports indicated the hanging of two other prisoners, Saleh Mota’ahil, 38, and Yar-Ali Nouri, 40, who were held in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province’s Shahr-e Kord prison.
According to Amnesty International, among the 23 countries that carried out death sentences in 2017, “Iran executed at least 507 people.” At least 31 of those executions were public, and five of those executed were under 18 years old. These numbers account for more than half of all recorded executions in 2017.
From March through September, Iran has hanged over 40 Iranian Kurds and sentenced just under a dozen other activists to death, as reported by Hengaw, a group that writes on human rights violations involving Kurds in Iran.
Other cases that garnered international attention in recent weeks were that of Ramin Hussein Panahi and two cousins Loghman and Zaniar Moradi who were all executed on Sept. 08.
Editing by John J. Catherine