Despite international outrage, Iran executed a second protester for participating in anti-regime demonstrations. On Monday, Iranian authorities hanged a 23-year-old man from a crane after he was condemned by the country’s Shia-Islamic “Revolutionary Court” for having waged “war against Allah and His Apostle,” state media reports said.
A video of the execution circulating on social media showed grainy footage of a corpse hanging from a construction crane, surrounded by a crowd of regime-loyalists screeching “Allahu Akbar.” The crowd gathered at the scene was identified as the men of the Basij militia, a terrorist outfit affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
More gruesome hangings are expected as over a dozen Iranians have received death sentences for their role in the anti-regime protests.
The Associated Press reported the public hanging:
Iran executed a second prisoner on Monday convicted over crimes committed during the nationwide protests challenging the country’s theocracy, publicly hanging him from a construction crane as a gruesome warning to others.The execution of Majidreza Rahnavard came less than a month after he allegedly fatally stabbed two members of a paramilitary force after purportedly becoming angry about security forces killing protesters.The development underscores the speed at which Iran now carries out death sentences handed down for those detained in the demonstrations that the government hopes to put down. Activists warn that at least a dozen people already have been sentenced to death in closed-door hearings.At least 488 people have been killed since the demonstrations began in mid-September, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that’s been monitoring the protests. Another 18,200 people have been detained by authorities.Iran’s Mizan news agency, which falls under the country’s judiciary, published a collage of images of Rahnavard hanging from the crane, his hands and feet bound, a black bag over his head.Masked security force members stood guard in front of concrete and metal barriers that held back a gathered crowd early Monday morning in the Iranian city of Mashhad. (…)In the images of his execution, a banner bearing a Quranic verse: “Indeed the requital of those who wage war against Allah and His Apostle, and try to cause corruption on the earth, is that they shall be slain or crucified, or shall have their hands and feet cut off from opposite sides, or be banished from the land.”
The executions after Iran’s lawmakers, serving in the regime’s rubber-stamp parliament, overwhelmingly demanded the death penalty for protesters daring to defy the government. Last month, “227 members of Iran’s 290-seat Parliament signed an open letter to the country’s judiciary asking it to issue death sentences for those protesters who had been arrested,” the Times magazine noted.
So far, more than 488 people have reportedly been killed since protests erupted in mid-September following the death of a 22-year-old Iranian woman in the custody of the hated Morality Police. She was accused of violating the country’s Sharia dress code. Estimated 18,200 people are languishing in Iranian prisons for demonstrating against the regime since the uprising began.
While the Iranian regime is massacring peaceful protesters on the street and hanging them in public squares, the Biden administration still hopes to cut a nuclear deal with the Islamic regime. We continue to believe that diplomacy is the best way to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a gathering of left-wing “J-Street” activists in Washington, D.C. last week.
After the Biden White House abandoned President Donald Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” policy against the regime and replaced it with appeasement of the country’s ruling Mullahs, Iran has ramped up its nuclear weapons program and reportedly acquired enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb.
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