Two hanged in Iran prisons

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NCRI - Iran's fundamentalist regime has hanged two people in prisons in the northern city of Sari and the south-eastern city of Zahedan.

On Sunday a 27-year-old prisoner, identified only by the initials H. H., was hanged in prison in Sari, according to the regime's judiciary in Mazandaran Province.

Another prisoner, identified as Javad Sanji, 25, was hanged in Zahedan Central Prison on Saturday.

The hangings bring to at least 37 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”

Ms. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, was in Tehran on April 16 along with seven EU commissioners for discussions with the regime’s officials on trade and other areas of cooperation.

Her trip was strongly criticized by Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the NCRI who said: “This trip which takes place in the midst of mass executions, brutal human rights violations and the regime's unbridled warmongering in the region tramples on the values upon which the EU has been founded and which Ms. Mogherini should be defending and propagating.”

Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: "Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before."

"Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded" in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.

There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.”

The NCRI in a separate statement on Sunday warned that 10 death-row prisoners, transferred to solitary confinement in Ghezel-Hessar Prison in Karaj and Zahedan Prison, are at imminent risk of execution. It called on international human rights organizations to take urgent action to save their lives.