After the execution of a first protester, dozens of convicts risk death in Iran

From the streets to death row, the repression takes a new step in Iran after the execution, Thursday, December 8 at dawn, of Mohsen Shekari, a 23-year-old protester arrested at the end of September. He is the first convict executed since the beginning of the uprising which followed the death, on September 16, of Mahsa Amini, 22, after his custody in the Iranian capital for a veil judged “badly worn” by the morality police.

Mohsen Shekari had been tried for “enmity against God”. Either the fact of “to take up arms with the intention of taking away the life, property or honor of persons in order to instill fear or create a climate of insecurity”. The Iranian penal code does not specify how an act must be committed to create this “climate of insecurity”, leaving it to judges to interpret this provision. Mizan, the Judiciary News Agency, which announced his execution, called him “rioter who, on September 25, blocked Sattar-Khan Boulevard in Tehran”. He would supposedly “stabbed” and slightly injured a bassij, a member of the territorial militias which depend on the body of the guards of the revolution, the ideological army of the regime.

The execution of Mohsen Shekari comes after three days of mobilization on university campuses and strikes by shopkeepers which affected some fifty cities. Rallies and attempted demonstrations in Tehran were again put down by law enforcement.

“Corruption on Earth”

First presented in court on 1^er November, Mohsen Shekari was sentenced to death on November 20 and executed eighteen days later. Until the end, this young employee of a café in the capital clung to the hope of being spared. “They condemned me to scare me”, he explained to his fellow prisoners in section 241 of Evin prison, north of Tehran. One of them, since released, recalls that Mohsen Shekari hoped that his sentence would be reduced to “ten years of imprisonment if the militiaman withdraws his plain”. The family of the young man, who had not been informed of the confirmation of his death sentence by the supreme court, searched for his body Thursday in morgues and cemeteries of the city, the authorities having refused to return it to them.

On December 5, the head of the judiciary, Mohseni Ejei, confirmed that some of the death sentences pronounced against the protesters had been validated by the supreme court and that executions would take place soon. On the same day, the Revolutionary Guard Corps commended the judiciary for its “firmness” and invited him to speed up the proceedings against the demonstrators accused of “corruption on earth” or“enmity against God”. The appeal to these two accusations shows a desire to apply the death penalty quickly against demonstrators and political detainees.

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