Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) have marked the 14th anniversary of the executions of four Kurdish prisoners in Iran, in a post on social media platform X.
Shirin Alam Hooli, Farzad Kamangar, Farhad Vakili, and Ali Heydarian were executed in Tehran’s Evin Prison on 9 May 2010. Their execution took place without their lawyers or families being informed, KHRN said.
Kurdish woman Shirin Alam Hooli was arrested in June 2008 and charged with membership of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK). Before being transferred to Evin Prison, she was interrogated and tortured for 21 days in an unknown location, which she described in a letter to her family.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International had called for the release of Farzad Kamangar when he was imprisoned. A Kurdish teacher, he was sentenced to death on charges of “endangering national security” and for being a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Kamangar had been in prison since 2006 and reported that he was tortured so badly he had to be transferred to the prison clinic for medical attention.
Two other Kurds, Farhad Vakili and Ali Heydarian were also both executed after being charged with membership of the PKK and “moharebeh” (enmity against God). A fifth individual, Mehdi Eslamian, an Iranian, was also executed in Evin Prison on the same day as the four Kurds.
Fourteen years on, many prisoners and particularly Kurdish activists are still being executed in Iran. In April, at least 66 prisoners, including three female prisoners, were executed and 16 death sentences were handed down.
One of the prisoners handed a death sentence in April was Iranian rap artist Toomaj Salehi, sentenced after criticising the regime and supporting the nationwide ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ (Women, Life, Freedom) protests.
The protests, which erupted in September 2022 after the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, have pitted the people of Iran against the country’s regime.
At least 767 Iranians were executed in the year ending March 2024, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). An Amnesty report revealed that over 5,000 individuals were executed in Iran between 1 January 2012 to 31 July 2023.