Iran has executed at least 45 people on political charges this year, including a 26-year-old shopkeeper convicted of espionage on disputed evidence, as the regime accelerates a crackdown on dissent while pursuing nuclear negotiations with the United States, according to human-rights groups and official statements.
The hangings, most carried out in the past three months, come as Iranian authorities have pushed to strengthen internal control even as they start talks with the U.S. after negotiating a memorandum of understanding that would give the regime a financial boost from ending sanctions on oil exports. Negotiations that began in Switzerland this weekend are aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for broader sanctions relief, though talks have been hampered by continued fighting in Lebanon between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Iran’s regime executed Nasser Bakerzadeh in the main prison of Urmia, a city in the country’s northwest. Bakerzadeh, who had taken part in nationwide protests in late 2022 that began as a call for women’s rights and freedoms and escalated into a broader antiregime movement, was arrested in 2023 and accused of working with Israeli spy agency Mossad. He maintained his innocence to the end, according to Hamid Chapati, a former cellmate.
“He just wanted to live, to work, and to make his parents happy,” Chapati said.
A day after Bakerzadeh’s execution, his cellmate Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, a barber from a nearby village, was also hanged. Abdollahzadeh was arrested after the protests and accused of murdering a member of the Basij, a militia under the control of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In a phone call recorded by Rebin Rahmani of the Kurdistan Human Rights Network and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Abdollahzadeh said his conviction relied on a coerced confession.
“From the very first day of my arrest, I was subjected to violence, torture and threats, and forced to give confessions that were all false,” Abdollahzadeh said in the recording. “None of the charges brought against me are true. They know it, and God knows it. I am innocent.”
Chapati said that at his trial, surveillance footage and witness testimony placed him far from the location of the killing that would send him to the gallows. Chapati described Abdollahzadeh as a source of humor in a cellblock defined by fear.
“He would warm the cold atmosphere of the prison with jokes and laughter,” Chapati said. “When they killed Mehrab, they killed all that energy for life, and those laughs too.”
The head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, said at the end of April that cases involving alleged collaboration with aggressor regimes would be handled under expedited procedures and “addressed decisively and without leniency under the law.” Human-rights groups said espionage is being used as an increasingly elastic accusation to suppress political activity, alongside charges such as “enmity against God” and “corruption on Earth.”
“None of these individuals were allowed independent lawyers,” said Karen Kramer, deputy director at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a nonprofit organization based in New York. “There are serious fair trial and due process violations in these cases, and they are being rammed through the revolutionary courts and fast-tracked.”
The executions and thousands of arrests aim to maintain internal power, according to Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, a nonprofit group based in Oslo. “They do not have legitimacy among people. The economy is in a terrible state,” he said. “The only way they can hold on to power is by instigating fear.”
In addition to the hangings, thousands of alleged traitors and spies have been arrested in recent months, according to Ahmad-Reza Radan, head of Iran’s Law Enforcement Command.
The latest round of internal repression began when Iranian authorities suppressed street protests in January, killing thousands of demonstrators who were calling for sweeping political change against a background of a crumbling economy. The regime survived a U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that began Feb. 28 and soon resumed its internal crackdown.
Many of the executed were arrested following those protests, but others had been imprisoned for longer periods. Human-rights groups said that while many of those facing jail or execution for political offenses are young men in their 20s and 30s from ethnic minority communities, particularly Kurds, the current wave has caught Iranians from all ethnic and social backgrounds.
Roya Boroumand, executive director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, said many more Iranians face a punitive crackdown on their livelihoods. Authorities are confiscating families’ properties or setting high bail for arrested family members, forcing people to sell their possessions, she said.
Chapati, the former cellmate of both executed men, was released after serving a six-month sentence for political agitation and now lives in Iraq.