The Times – The teenagers on death row for daring to defy Tehran regime
Shortly before the call to prayer, the guards will lead Matin Mohammadi out into the light one last time. He’ll be jolted awake by the clanging of his cell’s iron door, as he is most mornings, taken into the prison courtyard and hanged.
It’s the fear that occupies the 17-year-old’s mind when he goes to sleep in Ghezel Hesar prison west of Tehran, waking each morning to mark another day survived but still on borrowed time.
Mohammadi, for now, counts drug traffickers and murderers among his companions in Ghezel Hesar, where he is incarcerated with adults in a sprawling jail complex notorious for overcrowding and shortages of water and food. And executions.
He was sentenced to death on February 9, after his arrest during anti-regime protests that swept Iran a month before. Two other teenagers were sentenced to death in the same case, according to human rights monitors.
Erfan Amiri was 17 at the time of his arrest and Ehsan Hosseini-Pour Hesarloo was 18. The three were accused of throwing petrol bombs into a mosque in Tehran province and setting it on fire, leading to the deaths of two members of Iran’s Basij paramilitary force.
Their trial, according to activists, was “fast-tracked, torture-tainted [and] grossly unfair,” with the case based on “forced confessions obtained during detention.” Late last month, however, Iran’s Supreme Court upheld their sentences.
“To this day, our child has not had access to a lawyer of his own choice,” a member of Mohammadi’s family told The Times on condition of anonymity, citing fear of regime retaliation. “The court-appointed lawyer not only failed to carry out the necessary follow-up but also actually helped the authorities place even more pressure on this child to confess.”
Mohammadi is not alone. Rights groups are sounding the alarm as young Iranians are swept up in the regime’s intensifying crackdown on dissent.
Since the US and Israel began launching airstrikes on Iran on February 28, the regime has executed at least 21 people and arrested more than 4,000 others, including children, on security-related charges, according to the UN human rights office.
Although President Trump says he has intervened to save eight women facing the death penalty, there is no clear evidence to support his claim. In fact, the situation is deteriorating, experts say.
“Under Iran’s broad and vague definition of national security crimes, many individuals, including children, remain at risk of capital punishment,” said Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The use of torture and mistreatment has also been regularly reported.”
On Thursday at dawn, 22-year-old Sasan Azadvar, a January protester, was executed in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, according to Hiwa, a human rights monitor based in Washington. He was said to have been a bakery worker from a low-income family who reportedly faced accusations like breaking the windows of a police vehicle and inciting others to join the protests. Activists say he made a forced confession after suffering from severe torture.
Hiwa says at least three teenagers also linked to the January protests have been executed since the war began: wrestling champion Saleh Mohammadi, Amirhossein Hatami and Mohammad Amin Biglari. At least five other teenagers remain at grave risk of a death sentence or execution, facing charges such as “waging war against God,” “corruption on earth” and attacking a military or state site.
“Since the protests and especially with the war, things have worsened: faster death sentences, younger individuals targeted, and increasingly rushed trials without due process,” Zhino Babamiri, Hiwa’s director of youth and education, told The Times. “The system has long violated children’s rights but now it’s doing so more openly and with fewer constraints, partly because it feels more emboldened.”
At the same time, she said, the regime is reacting to “a more aware generation” that is challenging “the system’s ability to control through fear”.
In case after case, lawyers and families of young political prisoners described a system in which minors are treated not as children but as seasoned criminals. There are claims, too, of mock executions, a familiar method of torture within the regime’s jails.
In Shahin Shahr, in Isfahan province, a teenager arrested during the war faces a potential death sentence after being accused of “spying for the Zionist regime”, according to a family member speaking on the condition of anonymity. The family member said the boy was arrested for allegedly sending footage of a bombed site to a foreign media outlet.
“We did not even understand the meaning of the word espionage,” the family member said. “Given his young age, lawyers are trying to have the case referred to a special juvenile branch but so far they have not succeeded.”
In Iran’s capital, there is a special prosecutor’s office for juvenile crimes, a Tehran human rights lawyer told The Times, but in many other cities, their cases are processed in adult courts. “Many of the people handling them view these children as enemies of the Islamic Republic,” he said.
At one hearing, the lawyer said, he witnessed a judge tell a 17-year-old defendant “he should be executed because he had burned the picture of Agha,” referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who was killed on the first day of the war.
“The child was crying and the judge was laughing,” the lawyer recalled. “These things happen in many cities. There is no concern for the child’s wellbeing or even for his age at the time of the alleged offence.”
With a regime-imposed internet blackout, a highly censored press and lack of access for international rights monitors, the true scale of youth arrests and executions in Iran remains obscured. The Washington-based Iran Human Rights Activists News Agency estimated in late February that of the nearly 54,000 January protesters detained, hundreds were children.
One employee of Kachouii prison in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, told The Times that between January 10 and April 9, more than 2,000 young women, aged 16 to 25, arrived at the prison. It is unclear how many of them have been released.
Another Tehran-based lawyer who recently went to court to follow his clients’ cases described hallways crowded with detainees who looked more like children than criminals. “The corridors were full of young people who had not even grown beards or moustaches,” he said. “They had not yet reached full maturity.”
Other accounts that have emerged from behind Iran’s walls of silence describe a climate of violence inflicted on teenage detainees: routine humiliation, beatings and sexual terror.
Baran, a 20-year-old woman detained during the January protests and recently released from a prison in northern Iran, told The Times that some male and female protesters, including teenagers and young adults, had been raped.
“Some young female protesters told me they had been raped with glass bottles and that boiling water had been used to force confessions,” said Baran, who asked to use a pseudonym. “Several of them were between 15 and 25 years old. My mother, who had gone to court to follow up on my case, was told that this had also happened to many young men as well, that glass bottles had been used on them, too, causing anal tearing.”
Baran said that she had been given a suspended six-month prison sentence for calling for an end to executions in Iran. “For the smallest civil protest, we are arrested and tortured,” she said. “We truly need help — real help that reaches the people rather than deepening our pain.”
The woman’s accounts align with reports by human rights groups that teenagers and young protesters detained in Iran have been subjected to sexual abuse or threats of sexual assault, in addition to other forms of torture and ill-treatment.
A third Iranian lawyer told The Times his 17-year-old client had post-traumatic stress disorder after being charged with propaganda against the regime because he had “posted material” about the supreme leader on Instagram.
“From the moment he was taken from his home until he reached the detention centre, the officers in the car beat and insulted him so viciously that even after his release, he has remained under psychiatric treatment to this day,” the lawyer said, adding that the boy told his mother that the officer overseeing his case had warned that if he were arrested again he would be raped. “He still has nightmares and in some cases even suffers from bedwetting.”
Lawyers trying to keep their young clients alive are under growing pressure themselves. Two Tehran lawyers, Amir Raisian and Milad Panahipour, were summoned to the security prosecutor’s office on Wednesday and temporarily released on bail after being accused of publicising the case of Ehsan Hosseini-Pour Hesarloo, one of the teenagers arrested during the January protests now on death row.
For many families, the legal process is even more harrowing because they do not know where their children are being held or why they were arrested.
In one case, two sisters in Karaj, one a teenager, the other a young woman, were arrested and accused of sending videos abroad during the war despite having no internet access, according to a relative.
The family have not been informed of the formal charges, the relative told The Times, but officers have told them that the sisters had laughed at a gathering of pro-regime supporters. “That laughter was enough.”