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Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during a government meeting in Tehran
Photo: Iranian Presidency / ZUMA Wire / IMAGO
Iran's judiciary has executed four members of the Kurdish minority following allegations of sabotage. The death sentences were carried out early Monday morning, the Iranian judicial authority said on its website Misan Online. The men were accused of collaborating with Israel's arch-enemy Mossad.
Accordingly, the convicts were arrested in July 2022 on behalf of the Israeli secret service for planning a bomb attack against a center of the Iranian Defense Ministry in Isfahan. They were sentenced to death in September 2023. According to Misan, the defendants had appealed against their death sentence.
According to the Justice Department, the men were recruited by the Mossad and sent to African countries for “training in military centers.” Representatives of the Mossad were said to have been present at the training, it said.
Sharp criticism from human rights activists
The Norway-based human rights organization Hengaw accused the Islamic Republic of an unfair trial. "Throughout the process, the prisoners were denied their basic rights to legal representation, visits and even communication with their families," Hengaw wrote in a statement. The confessions of the four Kurds were extracted under torture.
Human rights activists have criticized the practice of capital punishment in Iran for decades. There are no official figures on executions. According to an annual report from Hengaw, 829 people were executed last year. Amnesty International accuses the authorities of using the death penalty as an “instrument of oppression” against ethnic minorities.
In August 2023, Iran announced that it had thwarted a "very complex" project initiated by the Mossad to "sabotage" its ballistic missile industry. The bitter enemies Israel and Iran have been waging a kind of shadow war for years, accusing each other of acts of sabotage and assassination attempts.
aeh/AFP/dpa