On the morning of November 10, inside Evin Prison in Tehran, guards in Ward 7 closed off the doors leading to Ehsan Afrashteh’s cell. The 31-year-old civil engineer had been sentenced to death on charges of spying for Israel and was awaiting his second retrial. “After brutally beating him, he was taken to a high-security ward, his head and face were covered in blood, begging for help from others,” a post on Iranian journalist and human rights activist Mehdi Mahmoudian’s X account read only minutes after it happened.
