Iran announced on Monday, May 8 that two men had been executed for blasphemy.
Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli-Zare were convicted of ‘burning the Quran’ and ‘insulting the Prophet of Islam’, the country’s judiciary says.
The two men ran dozens of social media accounts ‘dedicated to atheism and desecration of the sanctities’, the judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported.
According to the news website of the judiciary in Iran, Mizan, Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare were put to death in the Arak jail in central Iran.
According to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, they were detained in May 2020 on suspicion of participating in the criticism of the Superstition and Religion Telegram channel.
In 2021, the Arak Criminal Court convicted Mr Mehrad and Mr Fazeli-Zare on blasphemy charges and sentenced them to death, HRANA added. They were also given six-year prison sentences for ‘running groups to act against national security’.
According to the panel, both individuals were confined to solitary confinement for months without access to family members.
Mizan on Monday confirmed this by saying that the two were operating a large number of websites that promoted atheism, Islamophobia, and other anti-religious viewpoints.
Mr Mehdad’s lawyer had insisted that he was innocent and his sentence unjust. BBC reports.
Iran Human Rights director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, claimed that the killings demonstrated the ‘medieval nature’ of theocracy in Iran.
Reacting to their deaths he said, ‘The international community must show with its reaction that executions for expressing an opinion is intolerable, the refusal of the international community to react decisively is a green light for the Iranian government and likeminded people around the world.
‘These executions must be a turning point in the relations between the Islamic Republic and countries respecting the freedom of expression.
‘Lack of a strong reaction by the international community sends a green light to the Islamic Republic and their ideological allies worldwide.”
According to Iran Human Rights, Iran killed at least 582 individuals in 2022, up from 333 in 2021.
The most recent assessment on executions by Amnesty International ranked Iran as the second-largest executioner in the world, trailing only China, which is said to execute thousands of people annually.
