Year 2024: At least 1,000 executions in 86 prisons, including 34 women, 7 juvenile offenders, 119 Baluch compatriots, and 4 public hangings
With the intensification of the regime’s crises, the pace of executions has increased. Forty-seven percent of executions occurred in the last quarter of the year.
On the first day of 2025, at least 12 prisoners were executed in Qezelhessar, Bandar Abbas, Yasuj, and Malayer.
Mrs. Rajavi: Khamenei resorts to these executions to suppress the people’s uprising demanding the regime’s overthrow. However, these atrocities only strengthen the determination of Iran’s youth to overthrow the religious dictatorship. The regime must be ostracized by the international community, and any dealings with it should be conditioned on halting executions and torture. Its leaders must be held accountable before justice.
In the final phase of his regime, Ali Khamenei is setting new records for crimes and executions to delay his inevitable overthrow. Official records show that the number of executions in 2024 reached 1,000, an unprecedented figure in the past three decades. Considering secret executions, the real number is significantly higher. The executions in 2024 represent nearly a 16% increase compared to the 864 executions recorded in 2023. According to Amnesty International, the number of executions in Iran in 2023 accounted for about 74% of all documented executions worldwide.
Meanwhile, the regime began 2025 with a new wave of executions, registering 12 hangings on the first day of the year (January 1, 2025). Five prisoners were executed in Qezelhessar Prison, five in Bandar Abbas, and two others in Yasuj and Malayer.
The pattern of executions in 2024 is directly tied to the regime’s political developments, crises and defeats.
Eleven percent of executions occurred in the first quarter, and 17% in the second quarter, coinciding with the regime’s preparations for two staged elections (the parliamentary elections in February and the presidential elections in June).
Twenty-five percent of executions took place in the third quarter. In the fourth quarter, as the regime faced severe defeats in the region and mounting economic and social crises, executions surged dramatically, with nearly 47% of prisoners hanged during this period.
695 executions, accounting for nearly 70% of the total, occurred after late July, under the presidency of Massoud Pezeshkian. On October 9, Pezeshkian defended these brutal executions, mockingly stating: “Those who talk about human rights ask why we execute murderers.”
Executions in 2024 were carried out in 86 prisons across 31 provinces, with half of the prisoners hanged in eight prisons: Qezelhessar 165, Shiraz 97, Isfahan 61, Tabriz 59, Central Karaj 44, Qazvin: 38, Mashhad 33, and Birjand 29.
Executions in remote prisons are harder to document, and the identities of many executed prisoners remain unrecorded. Among the executed were 119 Baluch citizens, highlighting the disproportionate targeting of this marginalized and oppressed ethnic group. The executed included 34 women and 7 individuals who were under 18 at the time of their alleged crimes. The average age of 491 victims whose ages were documented was 36 years. Four executions were carried out in public in an especially horrifying manner. Over half of the victims (502 prisoners) were executed on drug-related charges, despite the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its mafia networks controlling major drug trafficking operations worth billions of dollars across the region and globally.
Part of this network was exposed after the fall of Syria’s dictator. The regime continued its barbaric punishments. In one shocking incident, the fingers of two brothers were amputated in Urmia Prison, while the fingers of two other prisoners were severed in Qom Prison. Meanwhile, massive corruption and embezzlement by regime officials have become so commonplace that no one is held accountable. In another heinous act, Khamenei’s judiciary sentenced a prisoner from the 2017 uprising to eye gouging for allegedly blinding an SSF (State Security Force) officer by throwing a stone. The only so-called “human rights progress” under Pezeshkian was the judiciary’s declaration that “anesthetizing thieves before amputating their limbs is permissible” (regime website Asr-e Iran, December 25, 2024).
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), stated that the brutal wave of executions in 2024, especially in the autumn, is Khamenei’s desperate attempt to prevent the uprising of an angry populace who will settle for nothing less than the regime’s complete overthrow. These medieval crimes, however, double the resolve of Iran’s youth to topple the religious dictatorship. Silence and inaction in the face of such savage executions not only trample on recognized human rights principles but also embolden the regime to continue its executions, terrorism, war-mongering and pursuit of nuclear weapons. Mrs. Rajavi emphasized that this regime must be expelled from the international community, and any negotiations or dealings with it must be conditioned on ending executions and torture. Its leaders must be brought to justice for 45 years of crimes against humanity and genocide.
Source » maryam-rajavi