Iran International
Human rights activists are sounding the alarm over reports of secret and extrajudicial executions in Iran, warning that the authorities may be moving toward retaliating against detainees after the deadly crackdown on protests in January.
Domestic accounts—fragmentary and difficult to verify under heavy censorship—suggest that killings may be continuing beyond those reported during the nationwide unrest of January 8 and 9, when security forces opened fire on demonstrators in cities across the country.
One case frequently cited by rights activists involves Mohammad-Amin Aghilizadeh, a teenager detained in Fooladshahr in central Iran.
According to activists who followed the case, judicial authorities initially demanded bail for his release. Days later, his family was instead given his body, bearing signs of a gunshot wound to the head.
In another case, Javad Molaverdi was wounded by pellet fire during protests in Karaj, detained by security forces, and transferred to Ghezel Hesar Prison. His family later discovered his body in a cemetery, rights activists said.
Such cases have prompted warnings from international monitors. The United Nations special rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, has said she is closely following reports suggesting that executions and deaths in custody may be used to instill fear.
‘Doesn’t add up’
One of the most striking accounts received recently by Iran International comes from a journalist inside the country who described a conversation with a ritual washer working at a cemetery in Tehran province.
The journalist met the worker on January 27 and described him as visibly shaken, despite years of professional exposure to death. The washer told the journalist that the official reports “didn’t add up” for some bodies delivered to the cemetery.
“They bring a body that was clearly killed less than two days ago,” the worker said, “but say it has been in storage for 15 days because it was unidentified.”
“We have seen every kind of body for years—traffic accidents, heart attacks,” the worker added. “We can tell the difference. We know.”
Professionals working in forensic medicine and cemetery washing facilities often develop, over time, the ability to estimate time of death based on physical signs, even without laboratory tools.
Worrying precedents
The significance of the testimony lies not only in its emotional impact but in what it suggests about discrepancies between official explanations and physical evidence.
Such accounts cannot, on their own, establish a nationwide pattern. But taken together with reported cases of deaths in custody, they have intensified fears among activists that the authorities may be sending a broader message to protesters: that survival is no longer assured once dissent reaches detention centers.
Those fears are shaped in part by historical precedent.
Documented cases of extrajudicial killings in Iranian prisons—most notably in the early years after the 1979 revolution and during the 1988 mass executions—have heightened sensitivity to any signs that repression may again be moving out of public view.
The evidence gathered so far remains incomplete and uneven. But rights activists say it is sufficient to raise serious concern that deaths in custody and quiet executions may be occurring after protests have been suppressed.
Ali Shakouri-Rad said the protests on January 8 and 9 were a predictable outcome of years of accumulated social discontent, even if the scale of the response surprised political factions and security institutions alike.
Shakouri-Rad rejected remarks promoted by official media that foreign intelligence services or opposition networks orchestrated the violence.
“I do not believe this, and I think many people do not believe it either,” he said, referring to claims that Israel’s Mossad or networks associated with exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi were responsible for the violence.
Protests and unexpected scale
Shakouri-Rad said the breadth of demonstrations across almost 400 cities exceeded expectations across Iran’s political spectrum. “Reformists, conservatives and the security institutions did not think this many people would respond to Reza Pahlavi’s call,” he said.
While protests were foreseeable given sustained grievances among workers, teachers and retirees, he said, the social response exposed a deeper rupture that institutions had failed to anticipate.
‘Injecting violence’ to justify force
The reformist politician argued that violence was introduced by those seeking to suppress protests and then use that violence as justification. “I can more easily believe that those who wanted to suppress what they called unrest carried out these acts,” he said.
This approach, he noted, was not new, arguing that security agencies have historically escalated confrontations to rationalize harsher measures. “From the beginning it has been like this, and it has grown worse over time,” he added.
Shakouri-Rad cited an academic article by a doctoral student at Guards-run Imam Hossein University that described “manufacturing deaths among one’s own forces” as a method for controlling unrest. He said the model included the killing of Basij or police personnel or attacks on symbolic sites, later attributed to protesters to justify coercive action.
Shakouri-Rad described an incident in which protesters who fled into a dead-end alley were shot and killed by a Basij member. The shooter, he said, was not inherently violent but shaped by an environment of polarization that placed weapons in the hands of poorly trained forces.
Criticism of the presidency
Shakouri-Rad criticized President Pezeshkian for publicly relying on security briefings to explain the killings, saying it stripped the president of his standing as a centrist figure. Repeating those assessments on state television, he said, alienated the public, which had witnessed events firsthand.
“People were present and knew what had happened,” he noted, adding that the president should have questioned the security bodies over how such events unfolded.
He also questioned how alleged armed networks could operate across hundreds of cities without the knowledge of Iran’s security agencies, saying the lack of accountability, resignations or formal inquiries underscored the credibility gap.
A leader-backed presidency
Shakouri-Rad said Pezeshkian’s rise to the presidency was a project backed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, rather than the result of open political competition. Reformists, he said, assisted the process without understanding its nature.
Pezeshkian, he said, could have acted as a bridge to defuse crises only if real authority had been delegated.
Shakouri-Rad described the January killings as among the “darkest moments in Iran’s modern history,” saying the wounds left by injustice and the killing of young people – most of them under 30 – would not heal without truth, accountability and a fundamental change in governance.
Referring specifically to the bloodshed on January 8 and 9, Shakouri-Rad said: “It is not something we can erase easily in the coming years, or even in decades to come.”
The effort to compile a database of detained healthcare workers is led by the AIDA Health Alliance (AHA), named after Aida Rostami, a 36-year-old Tehran physician who treated protesters in secret during the 2022 protests, went missing after a hospital shift, and was later found dead bearing signs of torture.
Doctors involved with AHA say they have so far identified at least 40 detained healthcare workers across multiple provinces, including doctors, nurses, medical students, technicians and volunteer first responders. They say the figure is likely incomplete.
“Hospitals are no longer safe places,” said Homa Fathi, one of the doctors involved in documenting the cases. “If a doctor treats a protester, questions security forces or refuses to discharge a patient prematurely, that doctor becomes a target.”
Doctors working on the documentation say the crackdown has pushed medical care underground, forcing physicians to choose between their professional oath and their personal safety.
Some have established makeshift home clinics to treat gunshot and pellet wounds. Others report being followed, threatened or warned to stop providing care altogether.
The Norway-based rights group Hengaw reported this week that an Iranian surgeon, Alireza Golchini, had been charged with moharebeh, or waging war against God—a charge that carries the death penalty.
Golchini was later released on bail following international pressure, including a statement by the U.S. State Departmentcalling for his release alongside what it described as “all the brave doctors who have helped their fellow countrymen.”
Doctors following his case say it has not been closed and is not an outlier, but part of a broader effort to dismantle medical networks that support protesters.
Fathi described a hospital in southwest Iran where an elderly woman suffering from hundreds of pellet wounds to her face, back and legs was forced out of care to free beds for members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In other cases, she said, security forces fired tear gas inside emergency departments to clear wards, while doctors who confronted plainclothes agents photographing injured patients were later arrested.
She also cited an incident in which a medical intern was shot inside a hospital after protesting the presence of security forces. In one of the most disturbing accounts, she described unconscious patients being placed among the dead.
Another physician, Panteha Rezaeian, described cases in which doctors were followed to prevent home treatment, homes were raided, and physicians were warned to stop speaking publicly or face detention.
“We are seeing people attempt to remove bullets themselves or treat serious injuries at home,” Rezaeian said. “Some of them die days later, not because their injuries were unsurvivable, but because they were too afraid to seek help.”
Rezaeian warned that the denial of medical care had become “a secondary killing mechanism,” as injured demonstrators avoid hospitals out of fear of arrest or execution, risking death from untreated wounds, infections and internal injuries.
Doctors involved in the documentation effort say the pattern has intensified since January, with arrests accelerating after the latest wave of nationwide protests.
They warn that the systematic targeting of healthcare workers is intended not only to punish doctors, but to deter the injured from seeking care at all.
“This is not just about arresting doctors,” Rezaeian said. “It is about making people afraid to survive.”
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