The Islamic regime tortured and mistreated prisoners ahead of their execution on Saturday, according to letters and recorded phone calls shared with The Jerusalem Post by the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) on Wednesday.
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Yaghoub Karimpour, 43, and Nasser Bakerzadeh, 26, were hanged on Saturday, and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, 28, was executed on Sunday in Orumiyeh Central Prison. All three men were able to speak with the KHRN before their executions.<\/p>\n
None of the men\u2019s loved ones were informed of the execution, despite Iranian law guaranteeing families a final visit, the organization noted, and the men had not known about their execution when KHRN Rebin Rahmani spoke with them the Saturday before they were killed.<\/p>\n
The Islamic regime tortured Yaghoub Karimpour, a disabled Azerbaijani Turkic citizen accused of sharing intelligence with Mossad<\/a>, before his execution, according to a letter penned by Karimpour in January and shared with the Post.<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s judiciary sentenced Karimpour<\/a> to death, alleging he passed sensitive information to \u2060a Mossad officer. Both the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights and KHRN state that he confessed to the charges after being subjected to physical and psychological pressure.<\/p>\n He eventually confessed after agents threatened to increase the torture against his wife; he wrote that he could hear her crying during his interrogation. \u201cMany things were dictated to me, and I wrote untruths involuntarily and out of helplessness so that the torture and harassment of my wife would not continue,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n For two months after his arrest on June 16, 2025, he said he was held in a \u201cdark detention center of the Intelligence Ministry,\u201d before being transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison.<\/p>\n From his cell, Karimpour wrote to KHRN, sharing that he had been subjected to severe physical and psychological torture for approximately two months before eventually confessing to the crime of \u201cCorruption on Earth\u201d by Judge Sajjad Dousti.<\/p>\n A law graduate, Karimpour detailed how multiple rights were violated; failure to inform him of his right to a lawyer; preventing the presence of a lawyer (even a court-appointed one); blindfolded interrogations; death threats from the investigator; failure to provide evidence for the charges; the court\u2019s disregard for claims of torture; holding the trial in absentia via video recording in under 15 minutes; and changing the indictment on the day of the trial to a capital offence.<\/p>\n In the letters, he denied ever possessing state secrets and claimed he was denied legal representation until his case was referred to Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh in mid-October, 2025. He appealed the sentence unsuccessfully in November.<\/p>\n \u201cI have never held a position anywhere, nor have I frequented or entered government, military, or institutional centers. Naturally, I had no access to ordinary, confidential, or top-secret data, and I have not sent any information to any place or person; so how can they accuse me of espionage? [Ministry of] Intelligence agents want to blame their own faults and shortcomings on ordinary people; because if they were not at fault, so many commanders, scientists, and ordinary people would not have been killed in the 12-day war,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Karimpour shared that during his detention, he was denied access to medication he needed to manage his multiple physical disabilities, disabilities the regime was aware of as he received state funding prior to his detention. He stressed that the medication was denied as a means to pressure him into confessing. Karimpour\u2019s health conditions were tied to a spinal surgery and a lung surgery he underwent, in addition to chronic mental health issues. He survived in prison with the support of his fellow prisoners, according to the KHRN.<\/p>\n \u201cI suffer from a severe physical disability; my entire spine\u00a0has\u00a0been plated, I suffer from severe shortness of breath due to surgery on my right lung, my limbs, namely my arms and legs, are incapacitated, and I suffer from a severe neurological and mental illness, and I have fear, panic, and phobia of narrow, dark, and enclosed spaces. Also, due to my skeletal deformity, severe pressure is placed on my heart,\u201d he detailed. <\/p>\n \u201cNervous attacks exacerbate my shortness of breath and increase my heart rate. I have medical records for each of my conditions and am under treatment. Despite my specific physical and mental status, I was treated like an ordinary person and subjected to various forms of torture, duress, and coercive suggestion to extract false statements dictated by the interrogator.\u201d<\/p>\n Nasser Bakerzadeh was also accused of spying for Israel, though his death sentence for \u201cspreading corruption on earth through intelligence cooperation or espionage in favor of the Zionist regime,\u201d was twice overturned, according to an audio recording and documents he successfully sent to KHRN.<\/p>\n \u201cAbout four or five months before I was actually arrested, in the summer of 2023, some men came to my shop in plain clothes. When I asked who they were, they didn’t answer. They were armed and told me that if I didn’t come with them, they would take me by force,\u201d he said. \u201cI was scared, so I closed up my shop and went with them. I\u00a0got into a Persian car, and a motorcycle followed behind us. I didn’t even consider for a second that they might be from the IRGC Intelligence Organization; I had no idea who they were.\u201d<\/p>\n The men blindfolded him and transported him to a private room where they laughed at how terrified he became, thinking he had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. It was here they began questioning him about someone called \u2018Hashem\u2019 he worked with in the tourism industry.<\/p>\n \u201cSince I hadn’t done anything wrong, I spoke freely. I told them everything: in the winter of 2020, Hashem had messaged me saying he worked for a tourism company and wanted to collaborate on tourism projects. I agreed, and we ended up working together on several tourism-related jobs. That’s all it was, tourism. We never even took a photo near a military site. We were doing tourism research,\u201d he swore, adding that he had even got permission from the IRGC before taking the photos of tourism sites.<\/p>\n The court ruling noted that \u201cfrom the outset of the case, the defendant stated that when an individual described as a Mossad officer was in contact with him, he refrained from providing any information about military installations and, from the very beginning, reported the matter to the relevant authorities by calling police lines 113 or 110, but those authorities took no action. He also stated that once he realized the foreign individual was requesting information beyond tourism matters, he severed contact with that person.\u201d<\/p>\n The Supreme Court further stated that the prosecution had failed to prove the suspected Mossad agent was in fact connected to Israel.<\/p>\n He said that the IRGC had even failed to provide evidence to suggest that Hashem had connections with Israel, to the confusion of the Supreme Court, which is why his sentence had originally been reduced to 10 years.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was first arrested, the charge was \u2018acting against national security,\u2019 and there was no mention of Israel at all. Within two or three hours, that changed to “espionage for Israel.”<\/a> They took the opportunity and completely reframed the charges against me,\u201d Bakerzadeh claimed.<\/p>\n Fearing being sent to prison, Bakerzadeh agreed to help the IRGC locate Hashem, but they continued to harass him, showing up to his store and taking phones belonging to his customers. This behavior made him doubtful that the abductors were truly agents of the IRGC, and so he traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan for 20 days to reflect on the situation.<\/p>\n
In a call with the KHRN, Bakerzadeh recounted how he was abducted by plain-clothed IRGC agents in 2023.<\/p>\n