ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran carried out the “secret execution” of a Kurdish youth from a rural village as Iran state public defender, under the auspices of fighting to appeal the death sentence of their son, forced Mehrdad’s relatives to sign a private paper contract “secretly and behind the scenes” of the judiciary system.
Mehrdad Mohammadinia, a 27 year-old migrant worker hailing from the rural Kurdish village of Faslan in western Iran, “lacked political insight” and was completely uninformed in terms of “science, political literacy, and cyberspace,” according to sources obtained by Kurdpa, a human rights organization.
Mohammadinia was caught amid tumultuous protests in Tehran outside a fruit and vegetable market, his workplace and sole accommodation, during the January anti-regime protests in Tehran. After less than five months in arbitrary detention, Mohammadinia was secretly executed in Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj without his family’s knowledge.
New information obtained by Kurdpa reveals that Mohammadinia’s lawyer, a prominent state-vetted attorney assigned by Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) judiciary, forged court records, smuggled judicial records, and engaged in a series of fraudulent actions that the rights group described as “systemic horror.”
Back in January, in what Iran state media describes as ‘a coup orchestrated by the US and Israel,’ security and intelligence forces detained more than 20,000 people during anti-regime demonstrations as well as during the six-week war between Iran and the US, accusing civilian protestors of collaborating with the enemy — a charge that carries the death penalty.
The executions are part of an intensifying crackdown on civilians, where members of Iran’s minority groups are disproportionately targeted.
This comes amid executions of Kurdish political prisoners Javad Zamani and Abolfazl Saeedi on June 16, Ashkan Maleki on June 1, and the executions of a staggering 55 prisoners in May alone, held on politically motivated charges in the five-month span since protests ensued.
Based on documents obtained by Kurdpa, during the handling of Mohammadinia's case, “a private, secret, and illegal contract was concluded between the case attorney ‘Younes Karimi’ and the relatives of this prisoner.”
The document revealed that contrary to the standard procedure of the judiciary stating that government-appointed public defenders are forbidden from receiving any funds from the defendant or their family, Karimi carried out “a massive financial exploitation of the critical situation of a rural and working-class family whose son was on the verge of execution,” secretly forcing Mehrdad's relatives to sign a 2.6 billion toman private paper contract, “outside of the Sana electronic judicial system,” in order to represent the defendant and file the Supreme Court appeal petition.
Source documents reveal that his lawyer “never visited him in prison and has never spoken to his client, even for a few seconds.” The appeal bill also reflects that the reality of the case, the statements made in the lower court, as well as Mohammadinia's own defenses and explanations, are not recorded.
Rights groups identify the selection of regime-adjacent lawyers as a “trend” that the government has begun utilizing in order to “proceed in accordance with the security narratives in the structure of repression, intimidation, and securitization of society.”
The Mohammadinia case “reveals new dimensions of the Islamic Republic's use of the death penalty for crimes against humanity,” observes Saba Khorram, a freelance journalist, as well as “its use as the most violent means of suppressing and intimidating the people in society.”
