At dawn on July 28, the Islamic Republic of Iran publicly hanged Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi in Alikhani Square in Isfahan.
Security forces had filled the square overnight, and videos circulating online appeared to show people gathering in an attempt to stop the executions, before they were dispersed, with several reportedly injured and arrested.
The two men had been detained during January’s uprising and convicted in a mass case involving clashes in the square, the deaths of security personnel, and allegations of weapons possession and property destruction.
Rights groups said the convictions followed torture, forced confessions, and denial of independent legal representation. The two men were hanged at the same location where they had allegedly protested against the regime.
Four days later, guards at Shahrud Prison hanged Arvin Kheirkhahan, a young man arrested during the same uprising, without informing his family in advance. His relatives were instructed to collect his body in the early hours and bury him at 5 a.m. under security supervision. The judiciary issued no public announcement.
One execution was conducted in a public square under the gaze of an entire city. The other was carried out before dawn, with the family denied even the opportunity to prepare for death. But both belong to the same campaign of internal repression carried out by the Iranian regime.
The Islamic Republic’s response to January, when an estimated 30,000-40,000 people were massacred in two days, did not suddenly end when gunfire emptied the streets. It continued through arrests, interrogations, forced confessions, Revolutionary Court proceedings, and executions carried out months after the uprising’s immediate energy had subsided.
The objective is to change what Iranians will be prepared to do the next time they confront the state.
“Right now, it is mostly focused on internal social engineering,” Khosro Isfahani, research director at the National Union for Democracy in Iran, told The Jerusalem Post.
Isfahani rejected the idea that the timing of executions is primarily governed by the rise and fall of negotiations with Washington or developments surrounding the conflict with Israel and the United States.
Instead, he placed the executions inside a domestic campaign aimed at a population facing economic collapse, political anger, and the memory of the January killings.
The regime’s warning, he said, is simple. “If you move, we are going to kill you.
“If you resist, if you fight back, we are going to find you, arrest you, and hang you.”
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