A Tehran court has sentenced four Kurdish political prisoners to death on charges of collaboration with Israel.
Amid escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, the Norwegian-based human rights group Hengaw has warned that the lives of the prisoners are in imminent danger due to governmental and non-judicial political decisions being made.
Hengaw reported that the sentences had already been upheld by a higher court. Expressing deep-seated concerns over the swift execution process, the organisation emphasised the potential exploitation of these cases for political propaganda as the war in Gaza continues.
The prisoners, Mohsen Mazloum (27), Mohammad Faramarzi (28), Wafa Azarbar (26) and Pejman Fatehi (28), are members of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, a social democratic ethnic political party. Iranian state media claimed that the four Kurdish party members had been “detained armed when they tried to commit an explosion at the Isfahan industrial complex” in July 2022.
Following this report, the Komala Party issued an official statement calling the claims of the Iranian government groundless and stressing that “such a scenario has been proposed to suppress more people and protesters”.
It is reported that the families of the Kurdish detainees have received no information about their fate and whereabouts since their detention, and have had no opportunity to meet or telephone their loved ones.
Hengaw warns of the serious and imminent risk of execution of these prisoners, stressing that they have been held in security facilities for almost eighteen months, and have been “subjected to all kinds of physical and mental torture without access to the minimum rights of political defendants”.
According to Hengaw, the Iranian government institutions have also put pressure on the families of the detainees, with the Iranian intelligence recently interrogating and torturing Afshana Yousefi, the mother of Pejman Fatehi, for several hours, threatening her that they would summon and arrest other members of her family.
