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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Sarah Johnson and Maryam Foumani

‘Everyone is thinking about oil prices’: is Iran using the war to hide a surge in executions?

Photographs of five men, three of whom are holding signs in Farsi.
Clockwise from top left: Peyvand Naimi and Shervin Bagherian Jabali, who are believed to be alive; Pouya Ghobadi, Babak Alipour and Mohammad Taghavi who were executed this week. Photograph: supplied

It has been almost three months since Peyvand Naimi, 30, was arrested in connection with the mass street protests that spread across Iran in January before being brutally suppressed. Since then, he has been detained for more than a month in solitary confinement, appeared in a televised forced confession, and has undergone two mock hangings, beatings, interrogation, psychological torture and starvation.

He has been accused of involvement in the deaths of security agents during the protests and of celebrating the death of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, but his family insist he has done nothing wrong and that no formal charges have been made. He has been denied access to a lawyer; his relatives fear he now faces execution.

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