Iran secretly executes four as it hits global death sentence record
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Four more men, including two Kurdish political activists, were put to death in secret this week without informing their families, as Amnesty International recorded 2,159 executions in Iran last year — the highest of any country.
Iran secretly executed four men — two Kurdish political activists and two Iraqi nationals — without notifying their families or granting final visits, the human rights organisation Hengaw reported, as Amnesty International said Iran carried out more executions in 2025 than any other country.
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Ramin Zale and Karim Maroufpour were executed at the central prison of Naqadeh. The Iranian judiciary's official Mizan news agency said both men had been convicted of "armed uprising," "attempted assassination" and "forming a group to disrupt national security," and described them as members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, which Tehran designates a terrorist organisation.
The judiciary said the verdicts were based on confessions obtained in custody and that both men had legal representation at trial before the Supreme Court upheld the sentences.
Hengaw disputed the characterisation of the proceedings. The organisation said Zale, who was arrested in July 2024, was sentenced to death by the Mahabad Revolutionary Court after a hearing that lasted only a few minutes and was conducted without his chosen lawyer present. He had been held for more than 500 days before his execution.
Maroufpour, 29, was arrested in March 2021. Human rights monitors said he was beaten during his arrest, held in enforced disappearance for an extended period without contact with his family, and tried in proceedings his lawyers described as wholly unfair.
Hengaw said charges of armed rebellion and terrorism were routinely applied to Kurdish political activists by Iranian courts on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.
The Dadban legal monitoring website, run by a group of lawyers, has previously documented what it called a "widespread right of defence flaw" in security cases, saying defendants were frequently denied access to independent counsel and that hearings were held in minutes.
Families not notified
Separately, Hengaw reported that two Iraqi citizens — Ali Nader al-Obeidi, 27, and Fazel Sheikh Karim, 29, both from the city of Amarah — were executed at dawn on 6 April at Karaj Central Prison on espionage charges. Neither their families nor official media were informed.
Iran Human Rights said both men had spent approximately 11 months in security detention before sentencing, without access to lawyers of their choosing or a fair hearing. Iranian authorities had not publicly confirmed the executions at the time of publication.
With those four deaths, the number of people executed in Iran on espionage-related charges since the start of the war has risen to at least eight, according to Iran Human Rights.
RelatedIn its annual report published on Monday, Amnesty International recorded at least 2,159 executions in Iran in 2025 — the highest figure for any country in the world and part of a total of 2,700 executions recorded globally that year.
More than 200 people have been executed in Iran so far in 2026, a rate Amnesty linked in part to the government's response to the December protests.
At least 10,642 people have been executed in Iran since 2010, according to the organisation's cumulative data.
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