Iran: 12 prisoners hanged on Saturday

NCRI - At least a dozen prisoners were hanged in Ghessel Hessar prison in the Iranian city of Karaj on Saturday.

According to the information received from Iran, during the past week over two dozen prisoners have been hanged in this prison which none have been reported by the state-run news media in Iran.

The group of prisoners included men identified as Asghar Mir-adli, Adel Salmanzadeh, Abdullah Lozomi, Hossein Rostami, Mohsen Alipour, Sadegh Mohamad Ahooie. Mohammad Mahmoudi and Massoud Moahmaadi, according to reports.

The Iranian regime’s Interior Minister in Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet said on Thursday “Drug traffickers must be hanged and the judiciary should not have any mercy in dealing with these individuals.”

Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said: “There are pressure on us by the world for hanging drug traffickers. The reason is that the drug business has income of thousands of billions and those involved support the terrorist networks and give them money,” the state-run news agency ISNA.

The minister’s remarks comes days after a report from the office of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the U.N. Human Rights Council cataloged U.N. concerns about rights violations in Iran, described the high rate of executions in Iran a 'deeply troubling.'

“The Secretary-General remains deeply troubled by the continuing large number of executions, including of political prisoners and juveniles”, the UN report said.