Amnesty International has issued a document condemning the execution of Ali Saremi by the Islamic Republic and urging action to stop another seven political prisoners who are in imminent danger of execution.
The seven political prisoners identified as “Ja’far Kazemi, Mohammad Ali Haj Aghaei , Abdolreza Ghanbari (or Qanbari), father and son Ahmad and Mohsen Daneshpour Moghaddam, and Javad Lari, along with Farah (also known as Elmira) Vazehan”, like Ali Saremi, are accused of alleged links to the banned opposition group, People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI).
According to the international rights group, in the election protests of 2009 challenging the legitimacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory, these individuals were charged with “enmity against God” and sentenced to death.
Amnesty International reports that Ali Saremi’s family and lawyer were not informed about his hanging prior to the execution date and they were only alerted to it by Saremi’s inmates a day before.
The Amnesty international document goes on to the public to write letters addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and Ayatollah Amoli Larijani, Iran’s head of judiciary, to urge them to stop these execution sentences and remind them that “death penalty can only be carried out for ‘the most serious crimes’, which must be intentional crimes with lethal or other extremely grave consequences.”
The rights group goes on to add that family links to a dissident group should not be regarded as a criminal offence.
Iranian authorities executed Ali Saremi on December 28. He was accused of enmity against God and was linked to the PMOI for travelling to Iraq to visit his son in Camp Ashraf where a large group of PMOI members are settled since the Iran-Iraq War in the eighties.
