Iran has executed seven men on charges of killing security personnel and a Sunni cleric in cases dating back several years, the judiciary’s news agency Mizan reported on Saturday.
According to the Mizan report, six of the men were ethnic Arab separatists accused of staging armed assaults and bomb attacks in the southwestern city of Khorramshahr, Khuzestan province, that killed four members of the security forces. The seventh, identified as Kurdish national Saman Mohammadi Khiyareh, was convicted of the 2009 assassination of Mamousta Sheikh al-Islam, a pro-government cleric in Sanandaj, reports Reuters.
Mizan claimed the men were linked to Israel. Rights groups, however, argue Tehran regularly invokes such allegations to cast minority dissent as externally driven rather than domestic.
Human rights activists have also challenged Mohammadi Khiyareh’s conviction. They point out he was just 15 or 16 at the time of the assassination, arrested at 19, and imprisoned for over a decade before his execution. They say his sentencing was based on forced confessions, allegedly extracted under torture — a practice critics accuse Iranian courts of using systematically.
Amnesty International said more than 1,000 executions have taken place in Iran so far in 2025, the highest annual number the organisation has recorded in at least 15 years.
