As war escalates, Iran is using secrecy, speed, and fear to intensify executions of political prisoners and January uprising detainees.
As the war by the United States and Israel against Iran continues and public attention remains fixed on bombings, displacement, and regional escalation, the Islamic Republic’s execution machine has not slowed. If anything, it has accelerated. In less than three weeks, at least nine political prisoners and detainees linked to political cases have been executed, while at least 14 other political prisoners have been transferred to unknown locations and are feared to be at imminent risk.
The charges vary: “moharebeh,” or “enmity against God,” a capital charge the Islamic Republic has long used in political and security cases; alleged membership in the Mojahedin-e Khalq, also known in English as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK); collaboration with Israel; participation in armed action; or involvement in the January uprising. But the pattern is strikingly similar across the cases: opaque proceedings, heavy reliance on state-security narratives, repeated references to confessions whose conditions remain unclear, denial of meaningful access to independent counsel, sudden transfers, secret executions, and in some cases refusal to return bodies to families.
From the January Uprising to the Gallows
Today, on April 2, 2026, Mizan, the judiciary’s news agency, announced the execution of Amirhossein Hatami, an 18-year-old protester arrested during last winter’s January uprising. Hatami had been detained in Tehran and was one of seven defendants in a case heard by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court under Judge Abolqasem Salavati. The defendants were accused of setting fire to a Basij base near Namjoo Street in eastern Tehran on January 8, 2026, the day the Islamic Republic massacred thousands of protesters.
Hatami and the others were sentenced to death on February 7 on charges including moharebeh, “corruption on earth,” destruction of public property, and conspiracy against internal and external security. Before that, state television had already broadcast videos presented as confessions. In them, the young defendants appeared with blurred faces, shaven heads, and no visible ability to speak outside the script imposed on them.
Like the others in the case, Hatami was reportedly denied contact with his family for a prolonged period after arrest. He was also denied his own lawyer at the trial stage, while the defense lawyers chosen by the families were reportedly prevented from studying the case properly or intervening meaningfully in it. There are also reports that the other defendants in the same case were removed from the general ward of Ghezel Hesar Prison and taken to an unknown location, raising fears that further executions may follow.
Hatami’s execution came only days after the judiciary announced the execution of three other detainees from the January uprising in Qom: Mehdi Ghasemi, Saleh Mohammadi, and Saeed Davoudi. On March 19, just before Nowruz, officials said the three men had been separately executed after being convicted of involvement in the killing of two police officers during protests on January 8 in the Chaharrah-e Nekouei and Meydan-e Nobovat areas of Qom.
Yet the official details clarified little. Authorities insisted that all three had confessed during interrogations and in court. But in political and security cases in Iran, such confessions have long been among the most disputed parts of the judicial process, precisely because there is no independent way to verify how they were obtained.
In the case of Saleh Mohammadi, the questions are sharper still. According to the court’s initial ruling, the death sentence rested on the accusation that he delivered the fatal knife blow. His relatives, however, say he was at a relative’s home at the time of the incident and that the court refused to hear witnesses who could support his alibi. They also say the ruling leaned heavily on interrogation-stage confessions, while the conditions under which those statements were extracted remain unknown. Mohammadi was a wrestler. The opacity surrounding the role of the other two defendants has also raised serious doubts about whether their alleged actions were ever transparently established, or whether the punishment was proportionate.
Secret Executions and the Disappearance of Prisoners
If the executions of January uprising detainees showed the speed with which the state is willing to move against protest defendants, the executions carried out at the end of March showed something else: secrecy elevated into method.
On March 30, the judiciary’s media center announced the execution of two political prisoners accused of ties to the Mojahedin-e Khalq. One day later, two more political prisoners in the same case, Pouya Ghabadi and Babak Alipour, were also executed. According to Iran Human Rights, all four had been transferred from Hall 4 of Ghezel Hesar Prison on March 29, together with at least a dozen other political prisoners, to an unknown location.
The executions were carried out secretly. Families were not given prior notice. The bodies have not been returned. One informed source told Iran Human Rights that the families have been trying since March 30 to learn the fate of their relatives, but have received no clear answer. Their most basic demand, the source said, was simply to see their loved ones and know they were still alive.
The same report warned that at least 14 political prisoners remain in undisclosed locations, among them Vahid Bani-Amerian and Abolhassan Montazer, both sentenced to death. Also among those transferred are prominent long-term prisoners including Saeed Masouri, Ahmadreza Haeri, Afshin Baymani, Hamzeh Savari, Ali Younesi, Sepehr Emamjomeh, Reza Mohammadhosseini, Akbar Bagheri, Ali Moezzi, Meysam Dehbanzadeh, Loqman Aminpour, Arsham Rezaei, and Hossein Ramezani.
Several of these prisoners were among the founders or members of the “Tuesdays No to Executions” campaign, a prison-based anti-execution movement that began in Ghezel Hesar and later spread to dozens of prisons across Iran. That connection matters. It suggests that the state is not only eliminating defendants in politically sensitive cases, but also targeting prisoners who have helped turn opposition to execution into an organized act of resistance from behind bars.
The due-process concerns in this case are severe. According to informed sources, the prisoners had been convicted on the capital charge of armed rebellion, based on alleged membership in the Mojahedin-e Khalq, after grossly unfair proceedings marked by physical and psychological torture, including mock executions, and denial of access to their chosen lawyers. One of the lawyers in the case reportedly said there had been no notice of the timing of the executions and that, at the moment the men were put to death, the legal team was still waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling. Another source said the Supreme Court had in fact identified defects in the case and sent it back to the lower court for correction.
If that account is accurate, then these were not only secret executions but executions carried out in open contempt of even the regime’s own claimed procedures.
Espionage, War, and the Blurred Line Between Courtroom and Security Response
Another execution in this period points to a second wartime trend: the growing use of espionage accusations in an atmosphere saturated by military confrontation.
At dawn on March 18, Kourosh Keyvani was executed after being accused by the judiciary of transferring images and information from sensitive sites to Israel. Very little is publicly known about him. Before the announcement of his execution, his name had barely surfaced in public reporting. The authorities said he had been arrested in Savojbolagh in June 2025, recruited through social media, met handlers in Europe, received training, returned to Iran, and carried out missions. They also claimed communication equipment and foreign currency were seized from him.
But nearly all of this account comes from the security apparatus itself. No transparent information has been published about the conditions of his arrest, his access to an independent lawyer, the evidence tested in court, or the circumstances under which any confessions may have been obtained. The execution came just one day after Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed senior Iranian officials, intensifying the impression that the case unfolded in a moment shaped less by transparent adjudication than by a state desire to display swift retaliation and control.
That impression is reinforced by the broader legal and political environment. In the final days of the 12-day war, parliament moved to toughen punishments in espionage and “cooperation with hostile states” cases. The measure later became law. In such a climate, the boundary between judicial process and political-security reaction grows even more blurred.
War Has Not Interrupted Repression. It Has Reframed It
Taken together, these cases show that the war has not pushed internal repression to the margins. It has provided a harsher backdrop for it. Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, warned that war must not cause the Islamic Republic’s crimes against its own people to be overlooked. He described secret executions, refusal to hand over bodies, and the detention of prisoners in total uncertainty at unknown locations as forms of enforced disappearance and serious violations of fundamental human rights.
International warnings have mounted. Amnesty International said on February 20 that at least eight people had been sentenced to death within weeks of arrest after the January uprising in rushed and grossly unfair proceedings tainted by torture. The organization also warned that at least 22 other people were either on trial or awaiting proceedings in cases marked by coerced confessions and denial of legal rights. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has also warned of the alarming treatment of January uprising detainees, mass arrests, and death sentences in Iran. On April 1, he described the detention conditions of protesters as shocking.
The broader numbers also matter. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, at least 2,063 people were executed in Iran between January 2025 and January 2026, a 119 percent increase over the previous year. That figure includes many non-political cases. But the executions of recent weeks show something more specific: under wartime conditions, the state is using the death penalty not only as punishment, but as a political technology of fear.
The names are different. The charges are different. But the message is the same. In the middle of war, the Islamic Republic is still killing its prisoners, still denying families answers, still hiding bodies, and still relying on silence, speed, and secrecy to finish what its courts begin.
