Iran executed seven men on Saturday who were convicted of killing Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel and a cleric several years ago, state-affiliated news agency Mizan reported.
Six of the men were separatists accused of carrying out armed attacks and bombings in the south-western part of the country that killed four IRGC security officers. The seventh, Saman Mohammadi Khiyareh, a Kurd, was convicted over the 2009 assassination of Mamousta Sheikh al-Islam, a pro-IRGC cleric in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.
Mizan said the men had links to Israel, a charge that rights groups say Tehran routinely uses against individuals to portray dissent as foreign-backed rather than homegrown.
Activists have also questioned Khiyareh’s case, noting he was only 15 or 16 at the time of the assassination, arrested at 19, and held for more than a decade before his execution. His conviction, they said, relied on confessions extracted under torture- a practice activists accuse Iranian courts of using regularly.
The concerning increase of Iranian executions
On Monday, the IRGC executed a man named Bahman Choubi-asl, whom Mizan accused of being "one of the most important spies for Israel in Iran."
On September 17, a man identified as Babak Shahbazi by Iranian media was also executed after being accused of colluding with Israel. According to Reuters, Shahbazi was accused of using his position as a contractor to collect information from sensitive locations, including server rooms and centers linked to the military and security apparatus.
According to Amnesty International, Iranian authorities have executed more than 1,000 people so far in 2025, the highest annual figure recorded by the group in at least 15 years.
The concerning increase in political executions in Iran of individuals accused of having ties to Israel has coincided with rising tensions between Israel and Iran, with the number of executions per month spiking following the 12-Day War and the joint United States-Israeli destruction of the IRGC's nuclear infrastructure.