Alimohammadi, a Tehran University physics professor, was slain in January 2010 by a booby-trapped motorcycle parked next to his car just as he left for work in the morning.
Whether that’s specifically true in Alimohammadi’s case is arguably a bit harder to judge, since he was not directly involved in Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s western opponents have speculated that Tehran itself murdered him because he was a (low-key) supporter of the country’s opposition who in death could serve as an official martyr.
That would be awfully convenient: official martyrs come cheap but Iran doesn’t exactly have a limitless supply of particle physicists.
Accurately or not, Fashi confessed to carrying out Alimohammadi’s assassination, claiming that he was recruited, paid, and trained by the Mossad for the job.
Thousands were arrested, and brutally tortured into betraying their comrades. While most weren’t put to death, Roozbeh was both a true militant — he opposed moderates’ attempt to make common cause with the liberal Mossadegh government that the Shah had deposed — and the organizer of a network of military infiltrators. The British embassy called him the “Red Pimpernel” for his uncanny talent for slipping traps and getting about in disguise. But that act never has a long shelf-life.
Roozbeh was finally winged in a 1957 shootout and taken into custody, where he was tortured into his own confessions (e.g., that he had assassinated Tudeh members who were too willing about their police collaboration). After spending his last night on this planet putting NaNoWriMo to shame by cranking out a 70-page political manifesto, he’s supposed to have met his executioners defiant to the last, refusing a blindfold and crying “Long Live the Tudeh Party of Iran! Long Live Communism! Fire!”
But the volley that silenced Roozbeh’s cry can be seen in retrospect to mark the definitive elimination of communism from Iran’s political stage, the piece de resistance for SAVAK’s campaign of suppression.
After Roozbeh, Tudeh slipped into irrelevancy (Spanish link) … leaving little but the outsized myth of its most renowned martyr.
A year ago this date, three young men identified as Abolfazl Faraei, Reza Roshanfekr and Seyed Rokneddin Karimi were executed by hanging from cranes in Shiraz, Iran, on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery, and murder.
Disturbing images of the public hangings follow; click on any save the last to zoom to a larger disturbing.
Update: Shiraz marked the anniversary date by hanging eight more the day this post was published, April 16, 2012.
Another man was reported hanged the same date for murder in nearby Takhteh Kenar.
Two politically sensitive cases, otherwise unrelated to one another, were joined in hanging at Iran’s Evin Prison on this day last year, possibly in a tit for tat following the November assassination of a nuclear physicist.
Ali Saremi
Ali Saremi cut the highest profile of the two, a 63-year-old member of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI, aka MEK or MKO).
The PMOI/MEK/MKO, originally a Marxist revolutionary group opposing the dictatorship of the Shah, split with the theocratic Iranian Revolution.
Camp Ashraf was still there when the U.S. invasion rolled into Baghdad in 2003. (As of this writing, it’s only just now being closed.) While MEK has long been considered a terrorist organization, including by the U.S. State Department,* Iraq’s new occupiers also found this nest of exiles a convenient ally for its own campaign against Iran’s mullahs.
The organization has been much in the news of late both as a bargaining chip in regional diplomacy, and for lavishly bankrolling a lobbying campaign to get off everybody’s official terrorism lists — positioning itself as simply an Iranian opposition group. (It claims to have renounced violence.)
From Tehran, of course, there’s much less gray shading: the MEK is an enemy.
Saremi, a longtime member, was arrested four times for his association with the group.
The first time was in 1976; the last, and ultimately fatal, in 2007. He had just returned from Camp Ashraf to visit his son and commemorate the anniversary of Iran’s late-1980s mass execution of prisoners, an atrocity that claimed a large share of MEK sympathizers in apparent retaliation for the organization’s aforementioned wartime aid to Baghdad.
Saremi got the all-purpose mohareb death sentence — roughly, “waging war against God,” which can potentially compass any resistance to the Islamic Republic — basically for having a going association with PMOI. According to NCRI, Saremi’s prosecutor alleged that
[h]e visited Ashraf and during that he received necessary trainings and returned to the country … and eventually he was arrested in August 2007 for his repeated activities and participation in counter revolutionary ceremonies and gatherings in support of PMOI and dispatching reports to this grouplet (PMOI). During a search in his house some CDs, films, pictures from PMOI and hand written organizational documents linked to the grouplet were found and confiscated.
Ali Saremi’s portrait and memory are now powerful props for the MEK terrorism de-listing campaign.
Ali Akbar Siadati
Also hanged this day was a man named Ali Akbar Siadati, about whom only sketchy information appears to be available.
Siadati was condemned for spying for Israel from 2004 until his arrest in 2008, allegedly supplying Iran’s foe a wide range of sensitive military information — a crime to which Siadati confessed, according to the state news agency IRNA.
Who Siadati was, how he had access to military intelligence, and why (apart from money) he might have betrayed it seems to be publicly obscure.
Twenty-three at the time of his execution, Zamani was all of 17 years old when he committed the “crime” that earned him the rope.
That crime: abducting and raping a 24-year-old woman.
So, okay, one might say: pretty rough punishment but also pretty serious misbehavior.
Save for a few minor details. Like, that the “raped” woman was actually Zamani’s girlfriend. And that she said the sex was consensual. Apparently this testimony from the mere victim was superseded by three random village prudes willing to complain about what the licentious youth get up to these days.
Given his cruel treatment, it will not surprise that Zamani was an ethnic Kurd and that his legal representation fell somewhere between poor and nonexistent.
Persian speakers (I am not one) can take in this interview with the young man’s family.
At 5:00 a.m. this date last year, Shahla Jahed was hanged at Iran’s Evin prison for murdering the wife of Iranian footballer Nasser Mohammadkhani.
An international human rights cause celebre from the time of her 2004 conviction in a sordid televised trial, Jahed was also Mohammadkhani’s wife under a “temporary marriage” arrangement that was secret from his “real” wife Laleh Saharkhizan. So you might say, his mistress.
Both these women’s last day of liberty was the one in 2002 that Saharkhizan turned up knifed to death while Mohammadkhani was in Europe on soccer business. Jahed was arrested immediately, beginning a “taboo-breaking” legal odyssey.
After months of refusing to talk, she confessed to the murder in prison, even re-enacting the crime.
But by the time of her trial — in which an emotional, combative Jahed conducted her own defense — she very plausibly claimed that the confession had been extracted by torture. Here’s a bit of it, from the documentary Red Card (banned in Iran) that can be enjoyed in full on YouTube:
While Jahed herself made for can’t-look-away TV, the appearance of a onetime champion athlete in a feet-of-clay turn has led this affair to be compared to the O.J. Simpson murder case.
Like the Juice, Mohammadkhani was temporarily in some danger of death penalty charges himself; he spent several months in prison. Ultimately, he avoided jeopardy to his neck as a potential accessory or instigator by Jahed’s repudiated I-did-it-myself confession — possibly another reason why Jahed confessed in the first place — but the former striker did endure 74 lashes for the revelation that he and his temporary wife enjoyed chilling out with opium. Strictly verboten in Iran, of course.
And Mohammadkhani’s brush with the law scarred his honor even more than his backside. Beyond the possibility that she took the heat for him, the celebrity athlete potentially in a position to use his pull to save a woman’s life clammed up as her case progressed and deferred to his late wife’s family’s decision whether or not to give Jahed mercy. Reportedly, Mohammadkhani even attended the hanging — where Jahed again sobbed and begged for mercy until one of Saharkhizan’s relatives personally kicked the chair out from under Jahed’s feet.
The case itself had an unusually long lifespan in the judiciary; Jahed had been imprisoned well over eight years by the time she died. In 2008, the gears were even stopped by Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, a figure known in Iran for his support of de-escalating capital punishment generally.
Even if Shahla had committed the crime, which she didn’t, Shahla and the murdered wife are both victims of a male-dominated society, a system that gives all the rights to men. Shahla, Laleh [the murdered wife], and all other women like them are all victims of flaws in the Iranian judicial system and Iran’s unequal judicial system. Even the person who pulled away the chair today in her execution is a victim of the system.
Apropos of the women-in-the-judicial-system theme, Jahed’s case and even her execution were to some extent overshadowed by the simultaneous headline-grabbing matter of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Azeri woman who was at the time fighting a repugnant sentence of stoning for adultery. By December 2010, Iran had backed off the stoning bit without quite agreeing that Ashtiani wouldn’t be executed in some other way; in January 2011, it remitted Astiani’s death sentence altogether.
Philotas was one of Alexander’s “companions”, the elite cavalry who joined Alexander personally in battle. He had fought by Alexander’s side in the epic Battle of Gaugamela, which brought down the Achaemenid Empire and opened Persia to the legendary conqueror.
A year later, Alexander, and therefore also those companions, were winding down campaign season all the way on the other side of the late empire they had so stunningly dismantled. It’s the region of Drangiana on the present-day Iran-Afghanistan frontier. The Macedonians would name the city Prophthasia, Anticipation, in recognition of their chief’s narrow escape; we know it today as Farah, Afghanistan.
Unlike many of the “companions” who joined the young Macedonian king, Philotas wasn’t a bosom buddy of Alexander.
He was, instead, a bit of a political appointee who owed his position to the fact that his father Parmenion, a great Macedonian general, had backed the disputed succession of Alexander. Parmenion continued as one of Alexander’s generals; his kid — not particularly popular of himself but nevertheless a loyal and competent officer — got a plum gig in Alexander’s vanguard.
In this capacity so close to the royal person, Philotas was warned by a conscientious slave of an assassination plot going against Alexander. And rather incredibly, he didn’t bother to pass it on.
When the slave realized, a couple of days on, that the conspiracy hadn’t been busted, he proceeded to tell somebody else … and Philotas had some explaining to do.
For posterity, it’s as open a question as it was then: Philotas initially convinced Alexander that he had merely considered the whole thing so insubstantial as not to merit the king’s attention — but by the next day, Alexander had better inclined himself to the more damning reading, that Philotas was perfectly amenable to seeing Alexander eliminated.** If that were the truth, it would herald a conflict that would soon come to define the Macedonian’s coruscating and paradoxical career: the army’s rising discontent with its march so far from home, and its leader’s ever more visible habit of arraying himself in the alien habits of oriental despotism.
Philotas got a “proper” if farcically rigged trial before fellow-generals who were all too happy to be rid of him, and was tortured into confessing. He was executed either by stoning (actually the traditional Macedonian execution method, even for the likes of generals) or spearing.
(The scene is dramatized in the 2004 Oliver Stone film Alexander; the relevant bit can be viewed here.)
Parmenion, a greater character than his son, would also pay the forfeit of his son’s alleged misprision.
At the time of Philotas’s execution, Parmenion was commanding a large army several days’ ride from Alexander. Fearing that the torture and execution of his last remaining son (the other two had also died on campaign) might inspire the august general to do something rash, Alexander dispatched a few trusted officers to outrace the news: they murdered an uncomprehending Parmenion as soon as they reached him. Whatever one makes of the child, the father’s loyalty both to Alexander and his predecessor Philip II had never previously been impeached in a long and brilliant career. Alexander ought to have counted himself fortunate to have avoided any wider disturbance in the army from the rough handling of this beloved general.
The whole affair was sufficiently distasteful that it remained a sensitive matter of state security hundreds of years and hundreds of miles distant: An Elizabethan play about Philotas by Samuel Daniel earned its author some uncomfortable official scrutiny for its perceived commentary on the contemporaneous execution of the Earl of Essex … the fallen courtier whose prosecution of a Jewish doctor arguably informed Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
* The other — later and greater — crime was Alexander’s drunken murder of his friend and loyal commander Cleitus. (He’s the guy shown stabbing Parmenion to death in the clip from Alexander, a circumstance that plays better as drama than history.)
** It doesn’t help anyone’s fact-finding that the main alleged plotter committed suicide when they came to arrest him.
On this date in 2007, cousins Majid and Hossein Kavousifar (or Kavoosifar, or Kavoosi-far) were publicly hanged in Tehran for murdering a judge.
The judge in question had been noted for clapping some democracy activists in jail, but the authorities insisted that the case wasn’t political — that Majid admitted targeting Hassan Moghaddas (whose outsized portrait grotesquely decorated the scene) in a personal vendetta, as well as killing a couple of other people in a string of robberies.
Age-appropriate entertainment? A spectator at the hanging.
And while the 24-year-old Hossein died in fright, 28-year-old Majid played to those onlookers in the most insouciant execution pictures you’ll ever want to see.
Warning: Graphic images (and video) follow. (Many more can be searched up around the web.)
If not for China, Iran’s hundreds of annual executions would put it in a class all its own for capital punishment.
The legions of hanged in Iran are more than this site will ever manage with the biographical care that their friends might demand for their lives: we are doomed to know only a few, and often what we “know” is little more than a name and what an authority figure has accused him of. Ever it is thus: the kings and potentates, the star-crossed lovers and epic villains, make the history books. But most of the headsman’s clients are, like he himself, obscurities.
March 14: Four people were executed by hanging in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz, reported the Iranian daily newspaper Etemaad today.
According to the report the men were identified as:
Abolhassan (age not given), convicted of a murder in 1981
26 years old man (name not given), convicted of murder
Young man (name and age not given), convicted of murder
23 years old man (name and age at the time of committing the offence not given), convicted of raping two boys.
According to our sources, there are several minor offenders on death row in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz.
In 2008, at least two minor offenders were executed in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz.
Among the numerous ethnicities subject to rough treatment in Iran are Ahwazi Arabs, a minority concentrated in oil-rich Khuzestan, right on the border with southern Iraq. It was one of the bloodiest theaters of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980′s.
Heady days for the dirty war unleashed by America’s Iraq invasion. Iranian officials slated the “treacherous and criminal Britain” (occupying the adjacent region of Iraq) for backing the Ahvaz bombings. Confessions to that effect extracted from today’s two principals were broadcast the evening before their execution.
The wider Ahwazi population continues to face a troubling human rights situation (pdf), seemingly subject to ethnic cleansing meant to scotch any potential for Ahwazi nationalist sentiment and keep oil wealth in the hands of Tehran.
Ali Saremi cut the highest profile of the two, a 63-year-old member of the 
And you thought you’d seen sexual hangups.
An international human rights cause celebre from the time of her 2004 conviction in a sordid televised trial, 
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