Iran: An NGO reported that Iran executed a Jewish minority member who had been found guilty of murder on Monday, at a time when tensions with Israel were rising.
According to the Iran Human Rights group, based in Norway, Arvin Ghahremani was found guilty of murder during a street fight and hanged in prison in the western city of Kermanshah.
IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam stated, “The Islamic republic executed Arvin Ghahremani, an Iranian Jewish citizen, in the midst of the threats of war with Israel,” adding that the legal case had “significant flaws.”
Amiry-Moghaddam went on to say, “However, in addition to this, in addition to this, Arvin was a Jew, and the institutionalized anti-Semitism that exists in the Islamic republic undoubtedly played a crucial role in the execution of his sentence.”
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s once-vast Jewish community has shrunk, but it remains the largest in the Middle East outside of Israel.
Although Jewish Iranians were executed immediately following the revolution, no Jewish Iranian has been executed in recent history. Sonia Saadati, Ghahremani’s mother, had pleaded for his life to be spared.
Under Iran’s Islamic law of retribution (qisas), which allows for this option, his family urged the victim’s family to accept blood money.
The execution of Ghahremani was confirmed by the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan Online website, which stated that the victim’s family had “refused to give consent” to such a deal.
Following Israel’s offensives against armed groups backed by the Islamic republic in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon this year, Iran and Israel have engaged in unprecedented air attacks.
