Iran sentences labor activist to death for links to banned Kurdish group
According to human rights groups, Iranian authorities sentenced a trade union activist to death on Thursday. She is accused of having links to a banned Kurdish organization.
Sharifeh Mohammadi, who was originally arrested in Rasht, Iran, in December, was found guilty of the capital crime of rebellion and sentenced to death, Norway-based Hengaw and the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported.
She is accused of being a member of the Kurdish separatist party Komala, which is banned in Iran. Hengaw said she was “physically and psychologically tortured” during her detention by intelligence agents.
A revolutionary court in Rasht, the largest city in Gilan province on the Caspian Sea, found them guilty after a hearing and sentenced them to death, the groups said.
A source close to her family said Mohammadi was a member of a local workers’ organization and had “nothing to do with Komala.”
The U.S.-based, Iran-focused human rights group Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said the death sentence was related to “her involvement in an independent trade union.”
“This extreme verdict underscores the harsh crackdown on dissent in Iran, particularly trade union activists amid economic turmoil,” it said.
A campaign set up to support her case wrote on its social media accounts that the verdict was “absurd and groundless” and aimed to create “fear and intimidation” among activists in Gilan province.
Gilan was a major centre of the protests that erupted in 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman who had been arrested for allegedly violating the dress code for women.
Human rights activists accused the Iranian authorities of using the death penalty as a means of intimidating the entire population in response to the protests.
The non-governmental organization Iran Human Rights said at least 249 people were executed in Iran in the first six months of 2024, including ten women.
She warned of the risk of a “sharp increase” in the number of executions after Friday’s runoff in Iran’s presidential election, in which ultra-conservative Saeed Jalili will face reformer Masoud Pezeshkian.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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