1909: Sheikh Fazlollah Noori, anti-constitutionalist martyr

Shia cleric Sheikh Fazlollah Noori was hanged by Iran’s Constitutionalist government on this date in 1909.

We’ve observed previously the convulsions of the 1905-1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution, which proposed to bind the Qajar dynasty with a parliament. The movement achieved a constitution in 1906, which was then violently abolished by the Qajar sovereign. We meet the Constitutionalists in this post at the apex of their counterattack, in the heady aftermath of the July 13, 1909 Triumph of Tehran that forced that same Qajar sovereign to abdicate in favor of his young son


Painting of the 1909 Triumph of Tehran, at Sa’dadab Palace.

Needless to say, this was a tight moment for anti-constitutionalists.

Noori was that — not just that, but an apostate who had once espoused a parliament to restrain the despotism of the shahs, but denounced the project as un-Islamic when Western-influenced secular liberals emerged at the helm. Noori had had in mind a collaboration between state and religious authorities that would ensure a godly ship of state.

The tracts he’d issued in those key years anathematizing the reformists — and the support that he’d given the Qajar anti-constitutional coup a couple years earlier — weighed against him once those same reformists seized power.

He’s a martyr in the eyes of present-day conservatives in the Islamic Republic, who view him as a key figure in recognizing the colonial and anti-Islamic bent of western-style parliamentarianism, and an essential theorist for Islamic governance.

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1979: Gen. Nader Jahanbani and eleven others

Wire report via the Baltimore Sun, March 14, 1979:

12 shot by firing squads in Iran

Tehran, Iran (AP) — Firing quads executed two generals, a legislator, the former head of the national news agency and eight other men yesterday, continuing the purge that has killed dozens of former supporters of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Eleven men were executed in Tehran and one in the holy city of Qom, 100 miles to the south, after secret trials without the aid of defense attorneys.

Since the shah’s government fell February 12, Islamic revolutionary courts are known to have ordered the execution of 57 persons, including 12 generals, for alleged political and sex crimes. The shah is in exile in Morocco.

Meanwhile, there were indications yesterday that the new government is having success in bringing the economy back to life. The National Iranian Oil Company announced that production in the country’s oilfields had reached 2.5 million barrels a day, up from 1.6 million barrels a day last week.

The company said all but 700,000 barrels a day was marked for foreign consumption. Before anti-shah strikes paralyzed the economy, Iran exported about 6 million barrels of oil a day.

The company said it will resume selling Iranian crude on a contract basis to American, European and Japanese companies April 1. In recent weeks, oil has been sold on a spot basis to the highest bidder. Spot prices are in the range of $20 a barrel, compared to the OPEC price of $13.55.

At Tehran University, 40,000 young Iranians rallied to condemn Mideast peace efforts by President Carter and Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Council announced the 12 executions on radio.

Among those shot were Air Force Gen. Nader Jahan-Bani, former director of the National Iranian Sports Organization; Army Gen. Vali Mohammad Zandkarimi, former director of prisons, and Gholam Hussein Daneshi, a Muslim clergyman and former member of parliament who supported the shah.

Also executed were Mahmoud Jaafariian, former head of the official Pars news agency and former deputy director of the national radio and television service, and Parviz Nik-Khah, also a former deputy director of the radio-TV service. Both were former Communists who were sentenced to death by the shah in 1967, but who were pardoned and later went to the shah’s side.

Firing squads in Tehran also executed a corporal in the shah’s Imperial Guard and in Qom a former police officer was shot. Also executed were five members of the shah’s former secret police, SAVAK.

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2011: Yaqub Ali, stabber

An Iranian criminal named Yaqub (or Yaghoob) Ali was publicly hanged on this date in 2011, at Kaj Square in Tehran’s tony Sa’adat Abad neighborhood.

Not ten weeks earlier, he had in those same environs perpetrated a grisly public stabbing of his ex’s new boyfriend. The crime outraged Iranians the nation with the wildfire online and TV promulgation of video showing the mauled victim, one Mohammad Reza, helplessly bleeding to death on the street in broad daylight, unaided by any passerby — including two policemen who had witnessed the men’s altercation without intervening.

“The entire country was under shock after the incident,” according to a Tehran journalist. “No-one understands how the wounded man could have been left without assistance for so long. There is a general feeling that the incident is symptomatic of the growing insecurity in the country, especially in Tehran.”

The embedded video and the photo of the execution further down this post are very much Mature Content.

The speedy public hanging accordingly attracted a throng of angry onlookers.

According to an AFP wire story, “Separately, the ISNA news agency said that a convicted drug trafficker, identified only by his initials A.A., was executed in a prison in the town of Shirvan in northeast Iran. No other details were given.”

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1975: Nine Iranian communists

On this date in 1975,* Iran extrajudicially executed nine political prisoners.


This photo is a dramatic re-staging — evocative of a famous photo of executions in revolutionary Iran a few years later, or perhaps in the white-clad central prisoner’s raised arms, the Goya painting that forms this very blog‘s frontispiece. (Contrary to the reconstruction, the executioners had just one Uzi and took turns spraying it at their victims.) It’s part of a fascinating project by Azadeh Akhlaghi to portray 17 pivotal deaths in Iran’s history.
We took the prisoners to the high hills above Evin. They were blind-folded and their hands were tied. We got them off the minibus and had them sit on the ground. Then, [SAVAK agent Reza] Attarpour told them that, just as your friends have killed our comrades, we have decided to execute you — he was the brain behind those executions. Jazani and the others began protesting. I do not know whether it was Attarpour or Colonel Vaziri who first pulled out a machine gun and started shooting them. I do not remember whether I was the 4th or 5th person to whom they gave the machine gun. I had never done that before. At the end, Sa’di Jalil Esfahani [another SAVAK agent, known as Babak] shot them in their heads [to make sure that they were dead].

Account of a former Savak agent, Bahman Naderipour, who was executed after the Iranian Revolution. The New York Times report of Naderipour’s public trial has him recounting:

“We took them out of the jail and put them in a minibus and drove them to the hills. We had only one submachine gun, an Uzi, among us, so we took turns shooting them … we didn’t give them a chance to make a last declaration. We blindfolded them and handcuffed them and then shot them. I think was the fourth to shoot. We took the bodies back to the prison. and we had the newspapers print that they were killed during a jailbreak. We had the coroner confirm this version.”

The victims were Ahmad Jalil-Afshar, Mohammad Choupanzadeh, Bijan Jazani, Mash’oof (Saeed) Kalantari (Jazani’s maternal uncle), Aziz Sarmadi, Abbas Sourki, Hassan Zia Zarifi, Mostafa Javan Khoshdel and Kazem Zolanvar.\
The last two named were members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, the still-extant MEK back when it was still a standard Marxist revolutionary movement and not a cult.

The first seven named were members of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, a proscribed Communist guerrilla organization.

One of those seven, Bijan Jazani, was a co-founder of that organ and one of the greatest Communist intellectuals Iran ever produced. (For a flavor of his thought kick back with the Jazani collection in Capitalism and Revolution in Iran.) With him was Hassan Zia-Zarifi, long a collaborator in leftist circles.

The proceedings that had landed them in prison in the first place had already put them in the global spotlight especially given the horrific torture applied to the defendants. (Among other things, these seven were adopted by Amnesty International as watchlist political prisoners.) International pressure had staved off juridical death sentences … so the matter was handled extra-juridically instead, with the standard insulting cover story, “shot trying to escape.”

Iran reaped a considerable diplomatic fallout from these murders. Its embassies around the world were rocked by protests of emigres and human rights campaigners in the ensuing weeks; that May, a team of communist assassins gunned down two American Air Force officers stationed in Tehran to train the Shah’s security forces — claiming responsibility “in retaliation for the murder of nine of our members.” (UPI dispatch from Boston (US) Globe, May 21, 1975)

There’s a lengthy lecture on Jazani et al by Communist historian Doug Greene.

* Some sources give April 19 instead. I have not been able to resolve the discrepancy to my satisfaction.

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1997: Ali Reza Khoshruy Kuran Kordiyeh, the Tehran Vampire

Taxi driver Ali Reza Khoshruy Kuran Kordiyeh was publicly hanged on this date for a killing spree that earned him the nickname “the Tehran Vampire.”

For four months, the vampire had preyed on women in the neighborhoods near the place of his ultimate demise. He stalked, abducted, raped and slew nine women and girls, ranging in age from 10 to 47 — including a mother-daughter pair.

He’d been subjected first to court-ordered flogging, many of the 214 strokes administered publicly by relatives of the victims who were cheered on by furious onlookers.

“Innocent blood will always be avenged,” a cleric intoned to the crowd. “This is punishment for the criminal but for us witnesses it is a lesson to be learned … We are responsible for our actions.” Others expressed the lesson less politely.

“Do you see finally that God is greater, you son of a dog?” a man shouted.

“He is not a human,” said Marzieh Davani, a 38-year-old woman.

“I really cannot understand a human can do what he did. He deserves to die surrounded by the hatred of people,” said Amir Ezati, who had taken his place in the crowd at 3 a.m.

“Damn you, you killer,” somebody shouted. The chant was taken up by the others as Kordiyeh, wearing a dark green prison uniform and staring ahead impassively, was led underneath the crane where a noose was tightened around his neck.

A 195-second video of the scene, featuring Mature Content images of Kordiyeh’s flogging and hanging, can be viewed here.

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1982: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, revolutionary foreign minister

On this date in 1982, Iranian revolutionary politician Sadegh Ghotbzadeh was shot in Tehran’s Evin Prison for supposedly plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

Ghotbzadeh had come by his revolutionary aspirations back in the 1950s and 1960s, after radicalizing as a teenager with the ouster of nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh; he’d be kicked out of Georgetown University for neglecting his studies in favor of protesting the U.S.-backed Shah and enter a twilight world of professional revolutionary exiles.


In Paris with the Ayatollah Khomeini.

He eventually joined the circle orbiting the Ayatollah Khomenei, returning to Iran with him on the famous Air France flight of February 1, 1979. Ghotbzadeh would serve as the frequent translator and spokesman of Khomeini, eventually becoming Foreign Minister amid the tumult of the Iranian students’ seizure of U.S. embassy hostages in late 1979.

In those fraught months, the urbane Ghotbzadeh became a familiar face on American televisions. He was notable advocate within Iran for quickly ending the hostage standoff, and spoke openly about Republican U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan‘s ongoing behind-the-scenes project to prevent a hostage deal that might redound to his opponent’s electoral advantage.* His distaste for the hostage confrontation, as well as his westernized accoutrements, quickly set him at loggerheads with the revolution’s growing fundamentalist faction, and he was forced out of the foreign ministry in August 1980.

He was destined for the tragedy of revolutions devouring their own: arrested in April of 1982, his former associations with Khomeini availed him nothing in the face of a revolutionary tribunal that condemned him for “masterminding a plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic” and to assassinate Khomeini himself. Under torture, Ghotbzadeh confessed to planning a coup in a script right out of show trial central casting: “I am shamed before the nation. Free me or execute me.”

* This project succeeded so spectacularly that it’s still officially a kooky conspiracy theory in American political culture.

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1896: Mirza Reza Kermani, assassin of the Shah

On this date in 1896,* Persian revolutionary Mirza Reza Kermani was hanged publicly for assassinating the Qajar Shah of Persia.

Shah since his gouty father kicked off in 1848, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar enjoys the distinction of being the third-longest ruler in the long history of Persian polities.

Only 64 years old at his death, Naser al-Din was young enough to have made a good run at the longevity runner-up 16th century Shah Tahmasp I;** however, his increasingly dogged resistance to reform and proclivity for gifting economic concessions to foreign firms bearing lucrative kickbacks eventually induced a young revolutinary named Mirza Reza Kermani to shoot Nasser al-Din dead at a shrine. It’s alleged that he had foregone a previous opportunity to murder the king in a public space frequented by Jews celebrating Passover, for fear that the regicide would be attributed to them and induce pogroms.

Naser al-Din’s sybaritic son Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar struggled equally to manage his restive subjects’ hunger for better statecraft, eventually (in 1906) leading to a constitutional era setting an a parliament at loggerheads with the Qajar princes.

* I’m attributing the date based on original reportage datelines in the Western press. There are some attributions to August 10 and to August 22 to be found.

** Number one is Shapur II, who was king for all of his 70 years in the fourth century.

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1983: 26 in Tehran

London Times, Aug. 21, 1983:

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2009: Soheila Ghadiri

On this date in 2009, Soheila Ghadiri (or Qadiri) was one of five prisoners hanged at Tehran’s Evin Prison.

The homeless 28-year-old killed her newborn child in a possible bout of post-partum depression — telling the court (according to this German anti-death penalty site),

I ran away from my home at age 16 and married the boy I loved. He died in an accident and after that I commenced prostitution and became addicted to drugs. I contracted HIV and hepatitis. When my baby was born, I killed her because I did not want to have the same fate as me.

It’s been reported that the prosecution against her advanced in spite of the forgiveness extended her by the victim’s family; one supposes in this case that means the family of her late husband; ordinarily, under Iran’s sharia law, the victim’s family has the right to pardon an offender any time up to or even during the execution.

You’ll need Persian to understand this video blog about Soheila Ghadiri by Iranian opposition figure Azar Majedi:

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2014: Reyhaneh Jabbari

At dawn today in Tehran’s Shahr-e Ray prison, Iran hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari despite a worldwide campaign to save her life.

Jabbari, 19 years old when her life went awry in September 2007, was a designer in the capital convicted of stabbing to death Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi — a former Ministry of Intelligence employee whom Jabbari said had attempted to rape her.

According to Jabbari, Sarbandi contracted her to redecorate his office. On the agreed day, Sarbandi and another man picked her up in their car and drove her to an unfamiliar location, stopping en route at a pharmacy to pick up some unknown articles later shown in court to be condoms and a sedative.

The room Sarbandi escorted her to looked filthy and uninhabited. When a suspicious Jabbari refused to close the door or doff her shawl for her “client”, Sarbandi grappled with her.

The young woman managed to get her hands on a knife,* she said, and stick it in his back, then fled the building back to the city. She was arrested late that night at her home. According to Jabbari, Sarbandi was still quite alive as she left, and the last thing she saw at the scene was his never-identified companion — who had stayed in the car initially — bursting into the room to fight with Sarbandi himself for some reason she could not comprehend.

Jabbari was condemned in 2009 and even as her sentence was re-confirmed in the ensuing years by court after court, it became an international cause celebre — executing a woman for stopping her would-be rapist. Hundreds of thousands of sympathizers tweeted, Facebooked and signed petitions; so small as such outcry can seem against an implacable state, they did at least give the impression of factoring into a last-minute reprieve Jabbari received ahead of her previous hanging-date four weeks ago. Iranian celebrities too joined in the reprieve campaign along with usual suspects like Amnesty International.

Unfortunately, Jabbari’s accusing her victim of sexual assault did not position her very well for obtaining a reprieve from Sarbandi’s family — which has the power under Iranian law to pardon offenders, right up to and even during the hanging. Sarbandi’s eldest son accused her of lying and of hiding the identity of the second man, the one whom Jabbari suggested might have been the true murderer.

“Only when her true intentions are exposed and she tells the truth about her accomplice and what really went down will we be prepared to grant mercy,” Jalal Sarbandi insisted.

Today, her lips are sealed.

I don’t want you to wear black clothing for me. Do your best to forget my difficult days. Give me to the wind to take away.

-From a last will Jabbari left as voice mail for her mother

* This was Jabbari’s own knife, one she had purchased two days before the incident.

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