A Jewish Iranian man, Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, was executed Monday morning in Iran, a rights watchdog reported, after a two-year battle by his family and the local Jewish community to save his life. The Mizan Online website of the Iranian judiciary confirmed he was put to death.
Ghahremani 20, was hanged at the central prison in the western city of Kermanshah after being convicted of a murder during a street fight, said the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.
“In the midst of the threats of war with Israel, the Islamic Republic executed Arvin Ghahremani, an Iranian Jewish citizen,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, adding the legal case had “significant flaws.”
Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, 20, an Iranian Jew executed in November 2024 (Iran Human Rights)
A Jewish Iranian man, Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, was executed Monday morning in Iran, a rights watchdog reported, after a two-year battle by his family and the local Jewish community to save his life. The Mizan Online website of the Iranian judiciary confirmed he was put to death.
Ghahremani 20, was hanged at the central prison in the western city of Kermanshah after being convicted of a murder during a street fight, said the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.
“In the midst of the threats of war with Israel, the Islamic Republic executed Arvin Ghahremani, an Iranian Jewish citizen,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, adding the legal case had “significant flaws.”
“However, in addition to this, Arvin was a Jew, and the institutionalized antisemitism in the Islamic Republic undoubtedly played a crucial role in the execution of his sentence,” Amiry-Moghaddam added.
Ghahremani was allegedly defending himself against a knife attack when he killed Amir Shokri in a 2022 brawl.
Ghahremani’s mother, Sonia Saadati, had asked for his life to be spared.
His family urged Shokri’s relatives to accept blood money under Iran’s Islamic law of retribution, which permits this alternative to execution.
Mizan said the victim’s family had “refused to give consent” to such a deal.
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Under Iranian law, once a person is found guilty of intentional murder, the only way that the death sentence can be commuted is if the family of the deceased says it forgives the perpetrator.
Earlier this year it was reported that Shokri’s family had come under pressure from a close aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the intelligence division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to not accept the financial settlement, the Ynet outlet reported. The motive for the objection was reportedly his Jewish ethnicity.
Ghahremani was previously scheduled to have been executed in May but was granted a last-minute stay of the sentence at the time.
Ghahremani was sentenced to death under the Iranian penal code for retributive justice, know as “Qisas” in the Quran.
His defense claimed he was working out at a gym, as was Shokri who owed him money, Ynet reported. Shokri stabbed Ghahremani with a knife but the latter was able to wrestle the weapon from Shokri and stab him back, fatally injuring him.
His family has said that the trial ignored key aspects of the defense’s claims including his efforts to get Shokri to a hospital and to save his life, details of which were missing from court papers, Ynet said.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Iranian law states that if a non-Muslim kills a Muslim, Qisas can be applied and the perpetrator can be sentenced to death. However, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim in Iran, Qisas does not apply and no punishment is handed down, leading human rights experts to argue that the law discriminates unfairly against minority groups in Iran.
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there were some 100,000 Jews in Iran; by 2016, according to an Iranian census, that number had fallen to below 10,000.
While Jewish Iranians were executed in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the execution of a Jewish Iranian is unprecedented in recent years.
Iran is openly sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state and financially supports terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas that are also committed to this aim.
Prominent figures in the Jewish community of Iran intermittently issue anti-Israel statements that match the regime’s agenda.
Iran launched an unprecedented missile attack on Israel in April of this year, and then another last month, following the outbreak of Israel’s wars with terror groups backed by the Islamic Republic in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Israel responded to each missile barrage with airstrikes.
The Gaza war started on October 7, 2023, when Hamas assaulted southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. Hezbollah in Lebanon began firing rockets into Israel a day later.
Source » timesofisrael