In Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan), a Sunni Kurdish activist was executed after spending almost 15 years in Iranian prisons. According to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), Kamran Sheikheh was arrested in 2009 and charged with endangering national security and propaganda against the Islamic system. The 39-year-old was hanged in a prison in Urmiye, the NGO reported. The regime's judiciary did not yet comment on the execution.

Sheikheh, a native of Mahabad, was one of seven Kurdish prisoners of conscience sentenced to death in a joint trial for "spreading corruption on earth" (efsad-e fel arz). The sentence was also linked to the 2008 murder of a cleric in Mahabad, which was blamed on the Sunni activists, who consistently denied the charges throughout the trial. They also denied allegations that they were members of a "Salafist" group.

The case of the seven activists went through several appeals since the first verdict in 2018, and Iran's Supreme Court only confirmed the death penalty in 2020 - according to the KHRN, under pressure from the Ministry of Intelligence.

Sheikheh's six co-defendants, Ghassem Abasteh, Ayoub Karimi, Davoud Abdollahi, Farhad Salimi, Anvar Khezri and Khosrow Besharat, were executed since last year.

According to the KHRN, Sheikheh and his fellow prisoners were severely tortured in custody in order to force a confession. The torture methods allegedly included beatings, hanging from the ceiling, mock executions, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. All of the men were arrested between December 2009 and January 2010 and were initially held for months in a Ministry of Intelligence detention facility in Urmia. One of them, Anvar Khezri, who was executed in Karaj in May, even attempted suicide because he could no longer bear the torture.

288 executions this year in Iran

According to the NGO Iran Human Rights, at least 288 people have been executed by the Iranian regime since the beginning of 2024. Last year, the number was over 850, the highest since 2015. Executions in connection with the protests of the "Jin Jiyan Azadî" movement after the death of the Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody in autumn 2022 caused particularly large international protests. At least nine cases are known, but human rights organizations assume that the number of unreported cases is high.