After execution of first protester, dozens of convicts risk death in Iran

According to Amnesty International, twenty-eight people including three minors, arrested since the start of the dispute risk the same fate.

by Madjid Zerrouky

From the streets to the corridors of death, the repression crosses a new CAP in Iran after the execution, Thursday, December 8 at dawn, of Mohsen Shekari, a 23 -year -old demonstrator arrested at the end of September. It was the first convicted manner executed since the start of the uprising that followed the death, on September 16, of Mahsa Amini, 22, after her police custody in the Iranian capital for a veil deemed “badly worn” by the customs police.

Mohsen Shekari had been tried for “enmity with regard to God”. Either the fact of “taking up arms with the intention of removing the life, goods or honor of people in order to arouse fear or create a climate of insecurity”. The Iranian penal code does not specify how an act must be committed to create this “climate of insecurity”, leaving the judges to interpret this provision. Mizan, the press agency of the judiciary, which announced its execution, described it “as a rioter who, on September 25, blocked boulevard Sattar-Khan in Tehran”. He would have supposedly “stabbed” and slightly injured a bassidj, a member of the territorial militias who depend on the body of the guards of the revolution, the ideological army of the regime.

The execution of Mohsen Shekari comes after three days of mobilization on university campuses and clogging strikes that have affected around fifty cities. Gatherings and attempted demonstrations in Tehran were again repressed by the police.

“corruption on earth”

Presented for the first time before a court on 1 er November, Mohsen Shekari was sentenced to death on November 20 and executed eighteen days later. Until the end, this young employee of a coffee in the capital clung to the hope of being spared. “They condemned me to scare me,” he explained to his fellow prisoners in section 241 of Evin prison, north of Tehran. One of them, released since, recalls that Mohsen Shekari hoped that his sentence would be brought back to “ten years’ imprisonment if the militiaman withdraws his plain”. The family of the young man, who had not been informed of the confirmation of his death sentence by the Supreme Court, sought his body Thursday in the Morgues and the cemeteries of the city, the authorities having refused to return it to them.

On December 5, the head of the judicial authority, Mohseni Ejei, confirmed that some of the death penalties pronounced against the protesters had been validated by the Supreme Court and that executions would take place soon. The same day, the body of the revolution guards congratulated the judiciary for its “firmness” and invited him to accelerate the procedures against the demonstrators accused of “corruption on earth” or “enmity to the ‘regard for God “. The use of these two accusations marks a desire to quickly apply the capital punishment against demonstrators and political prisoners.

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