Three prisoners sentenced to death at Orumiyeh Central Prison – Nasser Bakerzadeh, Yaghoub Karimpour, and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh – were abruptly and separately transferred this morning to undisclosed locations, raising serious fears that their executions may be imminent.
An informed source in Orumiyeh, who spoke to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), said: “This morning, Nasser Bakerzadeh was summoned to the prison’s sentence-enforcement office alongside two other political prisoners, in order to meet with an official from the Public and Revolutionary Prosecution Office who is responsible for enforcing sentences. After the meeting, the other two prisoners returned to their ward, but Bakerzadeh was taken out of the prison in a refrigerated vehicle and transferred to an unknown location.”
The source added that Karimpour “was also taken out of the prison this morning on the pretext of being sent to the forensic medical department, and has not returned since.”
The whereabouts of Abdollahzadeh are also unknown. Following a verbal altercation with a guard in the visiting hall of the prison two days ago, he was placed in solitary confinement on the orders of the prison director.
This morning, another political prisoner held in the same cell returned to the ward, but Abdollahzadeh did not.
The sudden transfer of these three death row prisoners to undisclosed locations has heightened fears of the imminent execution of their sentences.
This comes as, according to information received, Bakerzadeh’s case had in recent days been subject to a stay of execution, and the execution of Abdollahzadeh’s sentence had been suspended for two months – a period that expired today. It has also been reported that Karimpour’s case has yet to be assigned to a branch of the Supreme Court.
Bakerzadeh, 26, from Orumiyeh, who has been sentenced to death on charges of “espionage for Israel”, issued an open letter several days ago in which he rejected the charges against him, appealed for support from the public and human rights organisations, and warned of the imminent risk of his sentence being executed.
Karimpour, an Azerbaijani Turkic Yarsani citizen with a disability, was arrested on 16 June 2025 by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and, after more than two months in that agency’s detention facility – during which he was subjected to severe physical and psychological pressure to extract forced confessions – was transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison.
Without access to a lawyer and through a brief process devoid of fair trial guarantees, he was sentenced to death by Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh on charges of “spreading corruption on earth” (efsad-e fel-arz) through “espionage”.
Abdollahzadeh was arrested on 22 October 2022 during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising by the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and was held for 38 days under interrogation involving pressure and torture, in an attempt to force him to “confess” to participating in the protests and to the killing of a Basij member.
Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh sentenced him to death on 19 September 2024, and the sentence has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
