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New Delhi: Four people have been hanged until now after being convicted on charges of popular unrest that erupted in September after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini.
Iranian media said on Saturday that former Defense Ministry aide Alireza Akbari was executed for spying, as reported by the news agency Reuters. The executions triggered condemnation from Europe and the United States, but Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has insisted that “identification, trial and punishment” of all those whom authorities believe were involved in violence will continue.
Raisi sat on a “death committee” as a young prosecutor in Tehran, overseeing the execution of hundreds of political prisoners in the Iranian capital, rights groups say. Raisi, now president after three decades, is presiding over an uncompromising response to domestic and international challenges that have seen Iranian courts pass dozens of death sentences.
“The executions are aimed at creating a republic of fear in which the people don’t dare to protest and the officials don’t dare to defect,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group think-tank’s Iran Project Director, as quoted by Reuters. Akbari, who was living abroad after acquiring British nationality, was “lured back” and arrested three years ago, Britain’s foreign minister James Cleverly said this week, Reuters reported.
Raisi is overseeing an unyielding crackdown on the unrest, in which campaigners say more than 500 protesters and dozens of security force personnel have been killed. Then, a few weeks following the July ceasefire which ended eight years of war with Iraq, Iranian authorities conducted secret mass executions of thousands of imprisoned dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic.
According to a report by Amnesty International, Inquisitions, known as “death committees”, were set up across Iran comprising religious judges, prosecutors, and intelligence ministry officials to decide the fate of thousands of detainees in arbitrary trials which lasted just a few minutes.
While the number of people killed across the country was never confirmed, Amnesty said minimum estimates put it at 5,000. Raisi, who was deputy prosecutor general for Tehran back then, was a member of the capital’s death committee, according to Amnesty. In a report published last year, Human Rights Watch quoted a prisoner saying he saw Raisi at a prison outside Tehran and that Raisi would go to the execution site to ensure the process was carried out correctly.
On being questioned in 2021 about allegations he was involved in the killings, Raisi said: “If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised … I am proud to have defended human rights in every position.” I have held,” as reported by Reuters.
Iranian officials acknowledged the executions but played down the scale. In February 1989, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said that “less than 1,000 were executed”. In 2016, another member of the Tehran “death committee” said, “We are proud to have carried out God’s order,” state media reported.
“Raisi has been brought up as president for a few reasons, including his brutality, loyalty, and lack of conscience. He showed these characteristics in 1988,” said Saeid Golgar of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “He is entirely on board with political repression.”
(With Reuters inputs)
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