Apr 14 2017
On the morning of April 9, 2017, hundreds of families of prisoners on death row, especially women, rallied in front of parliament, demanding the abolition of the death penalty. Demonstrators had come from Tehran, Isfahan, Fars, Lorestan, Yazd, Khorasan, Ilam, West Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Hormozgan, Sistan and Baluchistan, and Mazandaran provinces and carried banners reading: “No to execution”, “Don’t kill our children”, “You are killing breadwinner’s of the families”, “Every Iranian raises their voice against the death sentence”, “We demand the abolition of the death penalty”, “The request of all Iranians is the abolition of the death penalty”, and “Don’t kill life”.

The rally took place while the suppressive forces agents were deployed to the scene earlier, trying to prevent the formation of the protest by harassing and insulting families. To disperse the crowd, the mercenaries arrested a number of them and transferred them to an unknown location. To prevent spreading the news, Internet lines in the region were cut off. Consequently, a number of families went to regime’s prosecutor office in the Behesht street.

Yahya Kamal Pour, a member of the regime’s Parliament declared the number of people sentenced to death for drug-related offenses 5,300 people (state run news agency Khaneh Mellat, April 9, 2017). Earlier, Hassan Norouzi, another member of the regime’s Parliament had said that only “5 thousand people aged 20 to 30 years are on death row” (Mehr news agency, November 23, 2016).

The Iranian Resistance emphasizes that inhuman clerical regime, besieged by unresolved political, economic and international crises and in fear of popular uprising, has found the only way in the mass executions, and urges the international community to condition any deal and communication with this religious fascism to a halt of executions and torture.

Source: / ncr-iran /