Iran Executes 23-Year-Old Man in Further Crackdown on Protests

NY Times-Jan 23rd2024

By Leily Nikounazar and Emma Bubola

The Iranian authorities hanged a 23-year-old man early Tuesday, the latest in a string of executions linked to the large-scale protests that shook the country in the fall of 2022.

The man, Mohammad Ghobadlou, who worked in a barbershop, was accused of killing a police officer by running over him with his car. His execution, several months after the last hanging of a protester, illustrated how the government is continuing to crack down on dissent in the wake of that monthslong uprising against the Islamic Republic.

“They are killing us one by one,” the actor Ashkan Khatibi wrote on social media in a post that included a picture of Mr. Ghobadlou’s father, a disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, wrapped in a blanket in front of the prison, north of Tehran, where his son was held.

The protests were set off by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in September 2022 while she was in the custody of the morality police, accused of violating Iran’s hijab law. The months of demonstrations that followed in cities across the country broadened to include demands for social freedom and political change.

The security forces killed hundreds of protesters and arrested thousands. Many of the detained were accused of “moharebeh,” a broad term that means waging a war on God and is typically punishable with death. Iran has executed least eight people over the protests.

After Mr. Ghobadlou’s arrest in Tehran in September 2022, his mother, Masomeh Ahmadi, said that her son’s actions had been affected by “bipolar disorder and not taking his medication” and by the overall situation in Iran.

As a result, he “lost his control and was not feeling himself during the incident,” she wrote on Instagram. “He wasn’t able to make the right decision.”

Before his hanging on Tuesday, she appealed for his well-being in a video that she posted on social media. “Bring my son back to me,” she said. “Forgive my son, my sick son.”

In the months after Mr. Ghobadlou’s arrest, a group of 50 psychiatrists in Iran wrote a letter to the judiciary in which they urged that a committee of professionals examine his health before his sentencing.

The Mizan news agency, which Iran’s judiciary oversees, reported on Tuesday that the country’s Supreme Court had upheld the verdict and death sentence after a psychological examination.

But Amir Raesian, Mr. Ghobadlou’s lawyer, said on social media that the Supreme Court had overturned the sentence and that the last information he had received from the judiciary was that the execution had been put on hold, subject to further investigation.

He said he had been informed of the execution only a few hours before it was carried out.

“The execution of #Mohammad_Ghobadlou has no legal justification and it is undoubtedly considered #murder,” Mr. Raesian wrote on the social platform X.

Omid Memarian, an Iran expert with Democracy for the Arab World Now, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that Mr. Ghobadlou’s execution was consistent with the Iranian government’s efforts to intimidate those who opposed it.