Iran has executed a 23-year-old man for allegedly stabbing a pro-regime militia officer with a machete and blocking a street in the capital, in what appears to be the first execution of a demonstrator involved in recent protests that have rocked the country.
As many as 21 people have been charged with carrying the death penalty, and hundreds of others have been killed during the protests.
Iranian judicial news agencies said that the executed man, Mohsen Shekari, was found guilty of blocking traffic on 25 September and then striking a member of the pro-regime Basij militia, leading him to need 13 stitches in his left shoulder.
He was accused of having been encouraged to go to the protests by a friend who offered him a bribe to hit a police officer. The court found that he had used a weapon with the intention of killing, causing terror and disrupting the order and security of society. It convicted him of moharebeh or waging war against God under Iran's Islamic sharia law.
His case had been subject to an appeal, but he was not represented by his lawyer. His family was outside the jail where he was executed for attempting to find out his fate.
On Monday, Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps praised the judiciary for its tough stand and urged it to swiftly issue judgments for defendants accused of crimes against the security of the nation and Islam. The spokesperson for the Iranian judiciary, Masoud Setayeshi, announced on Tuesday that five people indicted in the killing of a Basij member, Rouhollah Ajamian, were sentenced to death in a verdict that they can appeal.
Amnesty International condemned the sentences. It said that the Iranian authorities must immediately quench all death sentences, refrain from seeking the imposition of the death penalty and drop all charges against those arrested in connection with peaceful participation in protests.
Interviewed in the reformist newspaper Etemad, Taghi Azadarmaki, a sociology professor, said if the system punishes the protesters, people's behaviour will become radical and their patience will end. The news of issuing death sentences and long-term prisons is dangerous. If this trend continues, people will tend towards fundamentalist changes. Senior politicians went to the University of Tehran campus on the annual students day this week to try to spark a dialogue with students who have been at the heart of the protests. But the mayor of Tehran was confronted with students who accused the regime of corruption and lies. He raged at the students when a group walked out of the classroom and demanded the release of their fellow students.
Iran's president Ebrahim Raisi arrived in an almost exclusively male audience during an event held with tight security at the University of Tehran, and was uncompromising. He said the protests had nothing to do with economic or cultural grievances but were a plot by the US to bring down Iran.