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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Amnesty International on Tuesday called for immediate action to halt the execution of several Kurdish prisoners, who were sentenced to death in “unfair” trials marred by claims of torture to obtain “confessions.”
Held in a prison near Tehran, seven Kurdish men are at risk of execution after they were convicted of “corruption on earth and national security offenses,” Amnesty said.
Anwar Khezri, Ayoub Karimi, Davoud Abdollahi, Farhad Salimi, Ghassem Abesteh, Kamran Sheikheh, and Khosrow Basharat were arrested between early December 2009 and late January 2010 in West Azerbaijan province in northwest Iran. They were sentenced to death in June 2018.
“I call on you to quash their convictions and death sentences and grant them fair retrials, excluding any ‘confessions’ obtained under torture and without recourse to the death penalty,” Amnesty said in an appeal directed to Iran’s head of the judiciary.
Four of the men have claimed being tortured by agents of the Iranian intelligence ministry, with Amnesty urging the judicial chief to “to ensure that their torture allegations are effectively and independently investigated.”
In a letter published three years ago, Khezri shed light on the ill-treatment at the Iranian prisons, saying he attempted to commit suicide for “being under severe torture.”
“I endured the most severe physical and mental torturer during my detention,” Khezri wrote while referring to the ministry’s detention center located in Urmia which he later described as “torture chamber.”
Iran is one of the biggest enforcers of the death penalty in the world.
Kurdish political prisoner Heidar Ghorbani was secretly executed on December 19.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly political prisoners, are jailed in Iran on various charges including advocating for democracy and promoting the rights of women, workers, and ethnic minorities.
Iranian security forces arrested at least 30 people in the Kurdish cities of Iran in December.
Ethnic minority groups including Kurds and Azeris are disproportionately detained and more harshly sentenced for acts of political dissidence, according to a July 2019 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran.
According to data collected by Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), more than 230 people were executed in 2020. The report added that more than 72 percent of executions were done in secret and not reported by the government.
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