Following the massive nationwide uprisings of December 2025 and January 2026 that brought the clerical regime to its knees, Tehran is accelerating its execution machine in a desperate bid to cling to power. The regime, which only managed to survive the recent popular revolt through the brutal massacre of thousands of protesters across the country, is now weaponizing the judicial system to instill terror.
In its latest criminal act, the regime’s judiciary has hastily issued severe, collective death sentences and property confiscation orders against four protesters arrested during the uprising in Tehran.
This ruling is not an isolated incident but part of a systematic, state-sanctioned killing spree designed to crush dissent. In just the past month alone, the regime has carried out 13 political executions. These victims include seven protesters from the recent nationwide uprising and six members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), underscoring the regime’s zero-tolerance policy for political opposition.
The victims and the draconian sentences
The four individuals unjustly sentenced to death are Mohammadreza Majidi Asl, 34, his wife Bita Hemmati, Kourosh Zamaninezhad, and Behrouz Zamaninezhad. Their arrests reflect the regime’s deliberate tactic of targeting families and entire neighborhoods in broad, coordinated security sweeps. Mohammadreza and Bita were arrested as a married couple living in Tehran. Similarly, Kourosh and Behrouz resided in the exact same building and were detained simultaneously during the crackdown. Another relative, Amir Ali-Hemmati, who is the fifth defendant in this joint case, was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison.
Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court condemned the four main defendants to the gallows on politically motivated charges of “operational action for a hostile state.” The punishment did not end there. In addition to capital punishment, each defendant was handed a five-year prison sentence under the charge of “assembly and collusion against national security,” and the court ordered the total confiscation of all their personal property.
A kangaroo court: Vague charges and forced confessions
These severe sentences were handed down by the notorious Judge Iman Afshari, head of Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court, who has a long and dark history of fast-tracking heavy sentences for political and security defendants. Human rights monitors highlight a complete lack of transparent legal documentation in this case. The indictment fails to provide any individual differentiation regarding the charges, uniformly condemning the group without establishing specific, factual evidence for each person’s actions.
Instead, the regime’s judiciary listed a litany of absurd, overarching charges against the protesters. These include “using explosives and weapons,” “harming stationed forces on-site,” “throwing objects including bottles, concrete blocks, and incendiary materials from the roofs of buildings,” “destroying public property,” “participating in protest gatherings,” “chanting protest slogans” in connection with “hostile groups,” and “sending content with the aim of undermining security.”
Legal observers and sources close to the families note that the primary basis for these death sentences is forced confessions extracted under extreme physical and psychological pressure. During their interrogation, the defendants were subjected to severe torture and kept in dire conditions, rendering any “confessions” legally void and exposing the trial as a sham proceeding devoid of basic legal standards.
The regime’s true motive: Terror in the face of public anger
The speed, severity, and collective nature of these sentences reveal a judiciary—and an entire regime—deeply terrified of the volcano of public anger still simmering just beneath the surface of Iranian society. Having barely survived the December 2025–January 2026 uprisings, the state apparatus is keenly aware of its own fragility.
By issuing harsh verdicts for citizens whose “crimes” include protesting or chanting anti-regime slogans, the clerical establishment is desperately attempting to intimidate the public. The regime hopes that by executing activists and seizing their assets, it can preempt the eruption of another inevitable nationwide revolt. However, these brutal measures only serve to highlight the regime’s fundamental illegitimacy and its reliance on sheer terror to maintain control.
The lives of Mohammadreza, Bita, Behrouz, and Kourosh—along with countless other political prisoners and detainees of the recent uprising—are in imminent danger. Their fast-tracked death sentences, following a month that saw 13 other political executions, demonstrate that the regime’s judiciary acts not as an organ of justice, but as a mechanism of political murder.
The Iranian Resistance urgently calls on the United Nations, international human rights defenders, and all relevant global bodies to take immediate and decisive action. The international community cannot remain silent while the Iranian regime slaughters dissidents. Immediate intervention is required to halt these imminent executions, investigate the use of torture in Iran’s prisons, and save the lives of political prisoners trapped in the regime’s death machine.