The hangings add to a growing list that has seen Iran execute one person every six hours in the past two weeks
\n TEHRAN
\nIran has executed two men who had been sentenced to death for using social media to promote \u201catheism and insulting religious and Islamic sanctities.\u201d
\nThe executions of Yousef Mehrdad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare were announced on May 8 by the judiciary\u2019s news website, Mizan, which did not say when the two men were executed.
\nZare\u2019s and Mehrdad\u2019s cases reportedly date to 2019, when charges were filed against them in the Arak Revolutionary court. Mehrdad, a father of three young children, was accused of online blasphemy, as well as having burned a Koran. Zare was reported to have confessed to insulting the prophet and Islam.
\nTheir hangings add to a growing list that has seen Iran execute one person every six hours in the past two weeks, according to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organization.
\nOn May 6, a Swedish-Iranian dissident who went missing from a Turkish airport two years ago before turning up in Iranian custody was executed on terrorism charges.
\nHabib Chaab, a founder and former leader of a separatist group called the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), had been accused of leading a terrorist group and sentenced to death for being \u201ccorrupt on Earth,\u201d a capital offense under Iran\u2019s strict Islamic laws.
\nThe ASMLA was blamed for a bomb attack on an annual military parade in the southwestern city of Ahvaz in 2018 that killed at least two dozen people and injured scores more.
\nThe raft of executions, coming amid continuing protests against Iran\u2019s clerical establishment, has led to an outcry from rights groups and calls by UN experts on Shi\u2019ite-majority Iran to stop the persecution and harassment of religious minorities.
\nIran Human Rights, which maintains a running log of executions in Iran, said 205 people have been executed in Iran so far this year, most of them on drug charges. Half of the more than 40 people killed in the past two weeks belonged to the Baluch ethnic minority, according to the rights group.
\nIn March, Amnesty International accused Iran of executing members of ethnic minorities as a \u201ctool of repression.\u201d
\nMaulvi Abdul Hamid, the influential leader of Iran, last week condemned the wave of executions said that the Islamic republic had made capital punishment an \u201cart.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The hangings add to a growing list that has seen Iran execute one person every six hours in the past two weeks TEHRAN Iran has executed two men who had been sentenced to death for using social media to promote \u201catheism and insulting religious and Islamic sanctities.\u201d The executions of Yousef Mehrdad and Sadrollah Fazeli […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-330160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n