An Iranian court has sentenced a 27-year-old mechanic to death on charges including cooperation with Mossad and moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” the Hengaw human rights organization reported.
Reza Zanganeh, originally from Malayer and living in Malard, was sentenced by Branch 2 of the Karaj Revolutionary Court and is being held in Ghezel Hesar prison, Hengaw said. His case has been sent to the Supreme Court, with a 12-day period for appeal.
Before his arrest, Zanganeh repaired foreign-made cars and had recently married. According to people close to him cited by Hengaw, authorities based the Mossad accusation on his work with foreign vehicles and previous work-related travel abroad.
Hengaw said security forces arrested Zanganeh at his workplace on April 3 and that his family was subsequently pressured to remain silent and avoid publicizing the case.
Iran’s rising wave of raids, arrests and property seizures against Bahá’ís amounts to “state-sponsored theft,” the Bahá’í International Community’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva said, citing hundreds of incidents since the January crackdown.
Simin Fahandej told Iran International that pressure on the community had intensified following nationwide protests in January, fitting what she described as a longstanding pattern in which Bahá’ís are targeted during periods of crisis.
“Every single time that there has been a crisis in Iran, the Baha'i community is the first to be scapegoated,” Fahandej said, adding that confiscation of Bahá’í property had been a feature of persecution since the 1979 revolution.
Fahandej said hundreds of cases of persecution had been recorded since January across more than six provinces, while prosecutions of Bahá’ís had doubled from the previous year.
“These arrests and imprisonment of Baha'is isn't an incident,” she said. “It's a nationwide state-led campaign of persecution.”
Cash, gold, instruments
Thirteen United Nations experts earlier this month also warned of an increase in persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran, including allegations of torture and enforced disappearance, and said 57 members of the community were detained or imprisoned.
The warnings come amid a series of raids on Bahá’í families in the central city of Isfahan in which security forces seized cash, gold, household belongings, vehicles, musical instruments and equipment used by families to make a living.
More than 20 security agents simultaneously raided three homes on Monday belonging to Amin Tabyanifard, his mother Bahariyeh Askarinasab and his son Nima Tabyanifard, a source familiar with the matter told Iran International.
The source said plainclothes agents searched the properties from around 8 a.m. until about 1 p.m.
Askarinasab lives in a separate unit in the same building as Amin Tabyanifard, while Nima Tabyanifard lives in another neighborhood of Isfahan.
Agents searched the family’s musical-instrument workshop and seized its tools, equipment and specialized machinery, along with several valuable handmade instruments.
They also seized cash, gold, electronics, household belongings and numerous musical instruments. Authorities later sealed the family’s music and musical-instrument store.
The source said agents in one of the raids used violence, beat people present and made threats.
Nima Tabyanifard was ordered to report to the Isfahan Intelligence Department, while other members of the family received summonses to appear before a court located at Isfahan’s Dastgerd Prison.
Fahandej said some recent arrests and confiscations in other cases had been carried out without warrants.
“These arrests and confiscations, I have to make clear, have taken place entirely illegally,” she said. “They did not have warrants for confiscation nor arrest.”
She said security personnel had in some cases climbed over walls to enter Bahá’í homes.
“If this is not theft and stealing people's property, I don't know what is,” Fahandej said.
She described one case in which a parent was arrested in front of a two-year-old child, and another in which authorities deployed 14 guards, five vehicles and a representative of the prosecutor general to arrest one woman.
‘You didn’t learn your lesson’
In a separate Isfahan case, filmmaker and journalist Sepehr Atefi said security forces raided his parents’ home for the second time in several months.
Atefi wrote on X that eight male agents and one female agent spent more than six hours searching the property and his father’s workplace, including the soil in flowerpots and a bag of rice.
He said agents packed household possessions, including a television, vacuum cleaner and toolbox, along with gold, valuables, communications devices and children’s toys, into his parents’ own suitcases and bags before taking them away in a pickup truck. The family’s car was also seized, Atefi said.
Atefi told Iran International that the repeated raids were taking a psychological and practical toll on his parents.
“This incident and its recurrence can mentally exhaust them,” he said. “Confiscating their IDs and mobile phones can trap them in administrative bureaucracy for days and disrupt their daily lives.”
When his mother objected to the confiscations, agents told her: “These are illicit possessions,” and: “You didn’t learn your lesson the first time,” according to Atefi.
He interpreted the remark as meaning that the family had failed to change its religion and said they were being targeted because they were Bahá’ís.
Fahandej said such language made what she described as the discriminatory nature of the raids explicit.
“There is no other basis for any of these confiscations, arrests, raids ... other than the fact that they're Baha'i,” she said.
She said court documents in some prosecutions had also explicitly cited membership in the Bahá’í community.
“With the misuse of their state authority, they essentially steal Baha'is' properties with complete impunity,” Fahandej said.
Livelihoods targeted
Fahandej said the economic impact of the seizures was particularly severe because Bahá’ís already face restrictions on higher education and public employment.
“Baha'is in Iran are banned from universities,” she said. “Then they're also banned from public employment, so they can't be doctors or lawyers, teachers, and any form of public employment.”
That leaves many members of the community dependent on small businesses and home-based work, she said, making the confiscation of tools, equipment and businesses particularly damaging.
“The basic and modest livelihoods that they would be able to build through these small businesses, sometimes home businesses, are also confiscated.”
Fahandej said authorities had increasingly used Article 49 of Iran’s Constitution, which allows the state to confiscate wealth deemed to have been acquired through illicit means, to seize Bahá’í property under what she described as vague pretexts.
She also pointed to large bail demands as another form of economic pressure.
“Some of the bail amounts that we see actually becomes the equivalent of working for a hundred years in Iran,” she said, calling it “quite a devastating form of persecution.”
Property confiscation has a long history in the Islamic Republic’s treatment of Bahá’ís. Fahandej said community and individual properties were seized in the early years after the 1979 revolution, while Bahá’í institutions were banned from 1983.
Crackdown widens
Recent cases have extended beyond property seizures.
Fahandej pointed to Peyvand Naimi and Venus Hosseini-Nejad, two Bahá’ís arrested in Kerman in southeastern Iran in January whose coerced confessions were later broadcast on state television. The Bahá’í International Community said Naimi was tortured and subjected to mock hangings in detention.
“We saw the forced live confessions of two Baha'is on television, essentially to justify persecution against them and the entire community,” Fahandej said.
A Revolutionary Court in the northern city of Sari has also sentenced 12 Bahá’ís to prison terms and restrictions on their social rights. Six other Bahá’ís were recently arrested in Sari and Karaj, while a Bahá’í student at Islamic Azad University in Birjand was expelled and barred from continuing his studies because of his faith.
Unofficial estimates put Iran’s Bahá’í population at more than 300,000. The Bahá’í faith is not recognized under the Islamic Republic’s constitution, which recognizes Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
Human Rights Activists in Iran said Bahá’ís accounted for about 62 percent of reported violations of religious minority rights in 2025.
Fahandej said the latest escalation was taking place as Iranians were already struggling with severe economic pressures.
“It's heartbreaking that amid an already difficult economic crisis in Iran, that the state-sponsored attack against the Baha'is is now sweeping the community, as they, together with all other Iranians, are already suffering,” she said.
A court in Iran has sentenced Leila Abolhassani, a 43-year-old mother of two teenage daughters detained during the January protests in the central city of Shahin Shahr, to death on charges of “waging war against God,” a source familiar with her case told Iran International.
The source said Abolhassani was only filming a supermarket fire when she was arrested on the evening of January 8. Branch 5 of Isfahan’s Revolutionary Court nevertheless sentenced her to death on charges of participating in setting fire to the store.
Abolhassani, who worked as a nail technician, was transferred following her arrest to Dowlatabad Prison in Isfahan, where she has been held for more than seven months.
Her case was referred to Iran’s Supreme Court following an appeal against the sentence and remains under review, the source said.
She faces execution if the Supreme Court upholds the ruling.
Abolhassani’s case follows reports of death sentences against two other men detained during January’s nationwide protests.
Earlier in the week, US-based rights group HRANA reported that Amir Mohammad Mojallal Choubari, 22, and Hossein Nazari, 25, were sentenced to death in separate cases.
Last Sunday, Iran executed Majid Adineh, another January protest detainee, after the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence.
Adineh was arrested on January 9 in Mohammadshahr, near Karaj. A Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death and ordered the confiscation of all his property over accusations of taking “operational action” for Israel, the United States and hostile groups.
Earlier this month, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said on that Iran was using capital punishment to “instill fear among the population and suppress dissent,” urging authorities to halt executions and move toward abolishing the death penalty.
He called the persistent lack of fair-trial and due-process guarantees “deeply troubling,” citing reports of confessions obtained under torture and cases in which executions followed within weeks of arrest.
The US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said Wednesday it had documented 950 executions in Iran since the beginning of 2026, including at least 20 women and 30 protesters. It recorded 45 executions in August so far.
The rights group said Iran’s use of the death penalty took place within a judicial system marked by unfair proceedings, a lack of transparency and political interference, with fair-trial protections systematically violated.
The Iranian general who has threatened Persian-language journalists abroad as potential military targets has a history of incendiary attacks on critics and was among officials who initially dismissed reports that Iran had shot down Flight PS752.
Abolfazl Shekarchi, a brigadier general and senior spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, said on Wednesday journalists working for Persian-language media abroad could be placed on a list of military targets.
“Media outlets such as Iran International, BBC Persian and Radio Farda are directly connected to Mossad, the US Central Intelligence Agency and other foreign intelligence services and receive support from them,” he said.
He called the employees of the Persian-language outlets “soldiers of Israel and the United States,” adding: “They can be included in the bank of military targets because, from our perspective, these are not media outlets.”
He provided no evidence for the accusations.
The remarks extend years of military and ideological rhetoric from Shekarchi against people and organizations Iranian authorities consider hostile, from protesters and opponents of compulsory hijab to foreign officials and media organizations.
PS752 reports called ‘absolute lies’
Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 shortly after takeoff on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 people aboard.
Reports that an Iranian surface-to-air missile had brought down the Boeing 737 were “absolute lies” and “ridiculous,” Shekarchi said as evidence pointing to a missile strike emerged.
Shekarchi portrayed the reports as psychological warfare against Iran, while Iranian authorities initially attributed the crash to a technical problem.
Iran's armed forces acknowledged three days after the disaster that its air defenses had shot down the passenger plane, saying it had been mistakenly identified as a hostile target during a period of heightened confrontation with the United States.
The admission triggered protests in Iran and abroad and accusations that authorities had sought to conceal responsibility for the disaster.
Shekarchi's categorical denial became one of the most prominent official responses to early reporting on PS752 before the armed forces acknowledged that an Iranian missile had brought down the aircraft.
His latest accusations against foreign-based Persian-language media employ a similar framework, casting journalism and information as components of an enemy operation.
Protesters and hijab opponents
Shekarchi has also directed security and military rhetoric at domestic dissent.
During nationwide protests in 2022, Shekarchi described demonstrators as deceived and accused the United States of seeking to manufacture deaths to sustain the unrest.
The protests spread across Iran following the death in morality-police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained over compulsory hijab rules.
His rhetoric had already extended to opponents of compulsory hijab.
Participants in a campaign encouraging women to appear in public without mandatory head coverings, along with artists supporting them, were “forces of Satan,” Shekarchi said.
Thousands detained over coronavirus information
Shekarchi also played a public role in the authorities' response to information circulating during the coronavirus pandemic.
Around 3,600 people had been detained by police and the Basij over what authorities characterized as rumors or false information about the outbreak, with more than 1,100 judicial cases opened, Shekarchi said in April 2020.
The figures showed the scale of the authorities' effort to police information about the pandemic as questions mounted over infection and death figures.
Shekarchi also drew criticism after minimizing coronavirus deaths among military personnel and healthcare workers.
The deaths of four doctors, nurses and paramedics were “not a number” of significance, Shekarchi said during the early months of the pandemic.
The coronavirus outbreak became another period in which Iranian authorities treated the dissemination of information as a security matter, with people detained or prosecuted over online material about the disease.
Threats beyond Iran
Shekarchi's rhetoric has also targeted Israeli and US officials and personnel abroad.
Israel's destruction was Iran's “greatest aspiration,” Shekarchi said in 2021, presenting it as an objective from which the Islamic Republic would not retreat.
Even tourist and recreational locations around the world would not necessarily provide safety for American and Israeli officials targeted by Iran, Shekarchi warned in March.
“From now on, based on the information we have on you, tourist destinations, resorts, and recreational and leisure venues around the world will no longer be safe for you.”
Earlier, responding to threats by US President Donald Trump against Iran's leadership, Shekarchi said an attack on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would prompt Iran to “set their world on fire” and leave its adversaries without a safe haven.
“Trump knows that if a hand is raised against our leader, not only will we decisively and courageously cut off that hand, but we will set their world on fire, give them no respite and leave them no safe haven.”
His latest remarks extend such language explicitly to journalists working outside Iran.
Two more protesters detained during Iran’s nationwide demonstrations in January have been sentenced to death, US-based rights group HRANA reported, amid a rise in executions and capital sentences following the unrest.
Hossein Nazari, 25, was sentenced to death by Branch One of the Revolutionary Court in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, HRANA reported Wednesday. He is being held in the city’s Vakilabad Prison.
HRANA said Nazari was convicted of “contact with hostile governments and groups” and “assembly and collusion to commit a crime against national security.” The sentence was issued in July.
Nazari was arrested by security forces during the January protests and transferred to Vakilabad Prison after interrogation and judicial proceedings.
His case was reported a day after HRANA said Amir Mohammad Majallal Choubari, 22, another protest detainee, had also been sentenced to death.
Majallal Choubari was arrested in Tehran on January 2 during the nationwide demonstrations and transferred to Qezel Hesar Prison in Karaj, west of the capital.
He had previously faced charges at Branch 33 of Tehran’s Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office, which handles security-related cases.
The charges included “assembly and collusion with the intention of committing a crime against national security,” disrupting public order, attempting to intentionally kill officers by trying to run them over and resisting officers.
Continued crackdown
The sentences come amid a sharp increase in executions and the use of capital punishment against protesters and political prisoners.
The US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center said Wednesday it had documented 950 executions in Iran since the beginning of 2026, including at least 20 women and 30 protesters. It said 45 executions had been recorded in August so far.
The group said Iran’s use of the death penalty takes place within a judicial system marked by unfair proceedings, lack of transparency and political influence.
It said systematic violations of fair-trial guarantees meant executions could amount to arbitrary deprivation of life under international law.
Iran International reported in late July that rights groups estimated around 100 political prisoners and protesters had received death sentences, while hundreds more faced charges that could carry the death penalty.
UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said earlier this month that Iran was using executions to “instil fear among the population and suppress dissent,” while raising concerns about torture-tainted confessions, rushed proceedings and a persistent lack of fair-trial guarantees.
Iranian authorities flogged two women detained during January’s protests 31 times each before transferring them to prison to serve custodial sentences, according to rights groups.
Neda Dadehjani and Setayesh (Behnoush) Sarabi were summoned to a court in Qorveh on Saturday, August 22, where they were flogged before being transferred to the women’s ward of Sanandaj Central Prison, according to the Geneva-based Hana Human Rights Organization and Kurdish rights outlet Kolbar News.
A criminal court in Qorveh had sentenced each woman to one year in prison, 31 lashes and two years of exile in Nikshahr, in southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan province, after convicting them of “disrupting public peace and order.”
In a separate proceeding, the Qorveh Revolutionary Court sentenced each to another two years in prison for “assembly and collusion to commit a crime against internal security.”
The two women were first arrested by security forces during the January 2026 protests in Qorveh.
Kolbar News said Dadehjani and Sarabi had applied to serve their prison terms under electronic monitoring but received no response before being summoned to court.
Dadehjani is an artist, puppeteer, costume designer and theater makeup artist.
Hana condemned the flogging as “state torture and a tool for intimidating society” and called for the women’s release and access to independent medical care.
The group also questioned the enforcement of the flogging alongside the prison sentences, arguing that it was inconsistent with Article 134 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, which governs multiple convictions and sentences.
The cases come amid a broader crackdown following the January protests, during which courts have handed down prison terms, flogging, exile and death sentences.
Other people detained in connection with the protests have also received flogging sentences in recent weeks, according to rights groups.
Iran’s judiciary has used flogging against artists and activists in previous years, including singer Mehdi Yarrahi and campaigner Roya Heshmati, whose sentences were carried out.