Pouya Ghobadi was seated alone in a prison yard. A single leafless sapling threw a thin shadow against a wall topped with coils of barbed wire. In one corner, someone had scrawled in Persian: “Death to the dictator.”
Ghobadi, 33, an electrical engineer from the western city of Sonqor, then began to sing. “I clench the weapon’s grip, with iron in my hand,” he chanted, his voice steady. “For fire is the only answer to this land.” The camera filming the young man tilted towards the sky.
Five weeks after this video was taken, Ghobadi was dead. According to Amnesty International, he was allegedly tortured before the Iranian regime hanged him on March 31, accusing him of armed rebellion against the state and membership of an outlawed organisation.
He was one of at least 17 people put to death by Iran over the five weeks to April 21, a pace that human rights monitors claim has been the fastest for decades. Amnesty believes Iran is the world’s second most prolific user of the death penalty, after China.
On Saturday an 18th person was executed, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. It accused Erfan Kiani of being a “Mossad hireling” and was guilty of destruction of property and arson during civil uprisings in January this year. He was hanged on Saturday morning.
Iranian opposition political groups shared videos and images with The Sunday Times that prisoners took surreptitiously and smuggled out of the Ghezel Hesar and Evin prisons. It includes footage of prisoners taking oaths before returning to jail and politically charged videos of final testimonies filmed before execution. In one video, six condemned men can be seen singing resistance songs together in the prison yard.
Six political prisoners who were recently executed in Ghezel Hesar prison: left to right, Vahid Baniamerian, Babak Alipour, Abolhassan Montazer, Pouya Ghobadi, Akbar Daneshvarkar and Mohammad Taghavi
Ghezel Hesar, a sprawling prison complex on the western edge of Karaj, 30 miles from Tehran, is Iran’s second-biggest jail. It holds around 20,000 people in a space built for a fraction of that number. The United States called it a “gross violation of human rights” that utilises “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment”. Evin prison, in Tehran, is the country’s primary penitentiary for political prisoners.
The entrance of Evin prison in TehranMAJID ASGARIPOUR/WANA/REUTERS
In one video, Vahid Baniamerian, 33, addressed Khamenei directly. Dressed in a red T-shirt and black hooded jumper, the prisoner said: “To the Supreme Leader who wants to execute us to create fear in society. I want to remind you that I and those like me rose from the blood of freedom-loving youth.”
Baniamerian, who had a master’s degree in management, had also been accused of armed rebellion against the state. He spoke for 12 minutes, first in Persian and then in English, dismissing the court that sentenced him and describing Iran’s poverty as the reason he joined the protests.
“It is time for the world to correct the failed and disruptive policies of the past decades, policies which have only fuelled massacre and devastation in Iran,” he said in the footage. “Spreading war and terrorism throughout the region and the world. How much more suffering must there be before the world moves beyond words of concern to decisive action?”
He was later executed, on April 4.
Mahmood Reza Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Norway-based Iran Human Rights, said the rate of killings was “unprecedented”. He said that after the protests that swept Iran in 2022, following the murder of student Mahsa Amini, it took the regime a year to execute just eight demonstrators. Now, he claimed, it is taking a matter of weeks.
Amiry-Moghaddam, who has spent 18 years tracking executions in Iran, said the US and Israel’s war against the country has given Tehran cover to carry out its executions. “The world is completely focused on oil prices [and] the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
Mahmood Reza Amiry-MoghaddamPETTER BERNTSEN/AFP/Getty Images
There were at least 1,639 executions in 2025, a 68 per cent increase on the previous year, according to the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, though some estimates are as high as 2,000 because only a small number of executions are officially announced.
According to Iran Human Rights, at least 145 executions have been confirmed since the US-Israeli war began on February 28. More than 400 additional cases have been reported but remain unverified. Around 30 people arrested during the January protests have been sentenced to death and hundreds more face charges that could lead to executions.
Last week, Donald Trump claimed that eight women imprisoned in Iran were due to be killed, but claimed the regime cancelled the executions at his request. In response, the Iranian judiciary denied the suggestion, while the semi-official news agency Mizan said the women had never faced the death penalty in the first place, calling the president’s claims “false news”.
The Centre for Human Rights in Iran, an independent monitor based in New York, said court documents show only one of the eight women, Bita Hemmati, has been sentenced to death. The other seven women are real, but human rights groups including Iran Human Rights have not been able to confirm the claims. At least two had already been released on bail by March.
But on April 22, the same day Trump posted on social media about the cases, Iran carried out another execution. It was the 17th in a little over 30 days. The country’s judiciary said that Mehdi Farid, a former employee of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation from Arak, passed sensitive information about the company’s internal structures and staff to Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Rights groups said Farid’s original ten-year sentence had been escalated to death after prosecutors objected. They claim he had voluntarily reported suspicious approaches to the company’s security office, but was nevertheless charged. Civil liberty groups have repeatedly warned that espionage charges in Iran are routinely applied without credible evidence and after trials lasting minutes.
The killings began on March 19, on the eve of Nowruz, the Persian new year. The war had already been raging for almost three weeks when three young men were hanged publicly in the city of Qom. They included Saleh Mohammadi, a national wrestling champion who had turned 19 in his cell two weeks earlier.
Accused of killing a security officer during the protests, which were sparked by nationwide discontent over record inflation and food prices, Mohammadi was arrested on January 15. His confession had been extracted under torture, according to Amnesty International, and his hands were fractured from the beatings. By February 4, he had been sentenced and was dead less than six weeks later, hanged on the very spot where he was accused of taking the security officer’s life.
Nineteen-year-old Saleh Mohammadi, left, and two other protesters in court this year. All three were executedWANA/Reuters
Between March 30 and April 21, at least ten more people were executed, most in the early hours of the morning. Kristyan Benedict, a crisis response manager at Amnesty International, said due process was not followed. “[They were] tried in hearings lasting only a few hours and executed in secret. Families are not told. Lawyers are not notified. Bodies are not returned.”
“This is not a justice system,” he added. “It’s a machinery of fear.”
The People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), an opposition group banned inside Iran and operating in exile, has documented many of the executions and claims that many prisoners are not informed of their execution ahead of time. Their findings have been corroborated by Amnesty International.
A PMOI source told The Sunday Times that more than 20 guards entered Ward Four of Ghezel Hesar, the political prisoners’ ward, under the pretence of a cell inspection on March 29. The source said the guards separated six male political activists from their cells. They would go on to execute all six of them within five days.
Amnesty International said the group had been held for months or years before their executions, processed through revolutionary courts with no meaningful access to independent lawyers and sentenced on charges of “armed rebellion against the state” that they repeatedly denied.
The Sunday Times has also seen a political manifesto authored by the six political activists. The manifesto was smuggled out of the notorious Evin prison, where they had previously been held, in March 2025 and described why they continued their struggle. The group, which included Baniamerian, who was killed earlier this month, asked for the document to be published only after their sentences had been confirmed.
“We have already been executed hundreds of thousands of times throughout Iran’s history,” it said. “So if fate decrees that you execute us hundreds of thousands of times again, in the hope of the victory of a democratic republic and the freedom and flourishing of this captive homeland we will stand firm in our rebellious position.”
Amiry-Moghaddam said the regime does not fear war, but it does fear its own people. “We are dealing with a regime that does not have legitimacy among its own people,” he said. “The only way they can hold on to power is by creating fear.”
The PMOI spokesman said that those executed between March and April included eight members of his organisation and eight protesters arrested during the January uprising.
On Friday, a US negotiating team flew to Islamabad for a planned second round of peace talks with Iran after an earlier session failed to produce a peace deal. The talks, Amiry-Moghaddam said, do not touch on the condemned prisoners.
“There is no mention of the Iranian people’s situation — the executions, the brutal mass killings of the January protests — in any of the negotiations or discussions with the Islamic Republic,” he said. “The focus is completely where the regime wants it to be.”
Speaking at a conference hosted by the European Parliament on April 22, Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of the PMOI, said the “silence” of the EU in the face of the political executions is unjustifiable. “Such silence not only emboldens the regime to continue executions, but also signals weakness, encouraging it to persist in nuclear weapons development and terrorist meddling in the region,” she said.
The day after Ghobadi’s execution, his family gathered outside their home in Sonqor. One person present at the funeral said a steady stream of mourners arrived, despite a heavy security presence from the Iranian government, and chanted into the cold as his mother wept over an empty grave.
In the weeks before he was hanged at Ghezel Hesar prison, Ghobadi had sung into the camera: “He who cried for bread and water was branded a traitor’s soul. Condemned to the gallows, cast out beyond control.” The Iranian regime has yet to return his body.