Kurdistan Human Rights Network

Iranian authorities secretly executed prisoners Nasser Bakerzadeh, a Kurdish Sunni, and Yaghoub Karimpour, an Azerbaijani Turkic Yarsan citizen with a disability, at Orumiyeh Central Prison in the early hours of 2 May, without notifying their lawyers or families. Prison officials have since refused to release the bodies.

The executions were carried out in the presence of officials from the judiciary, the General Directorate of Prisons of West Azerbaijan Province, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) has learned that both men were transferred on 30 April from the general ward to a security facility in the city, where they were placed under pressure to record video confessions. They were subsequently returned to the prison in handcuffs and leg shackles and placed in solitary confinement.

From the evening of 1 May, telephone access to the political prisoners’ ward was severed and prison guards were deployed to duty officer rooms across multiple wards.

At the time of his transfer to solitary confinement, Karimpour’s case had not yet been assigned to a branch of the Supreme Court, and neither his lawyer nor his family had been formally notified of any confirmed death sentence.

The circumstances of Bakerzadeh’s execution are particularly striking. According to an audio file from Bakerzadeh in the possession of the KHRN, the Supreme Court had twice overturned his death sentence, which had been issued by Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh.

Part of the court’s ruling states that Bakerzadeh’s appeal against the verdict, which had convicted him of “spreading corruption on earth through intelligence cooperation or espionage in favour of the Zionist regime, pursuant to Article 6 of the Law on Countering the Hostile Acts of the Zionist Regime against Peace and Security”, was found to be valid and substantiated.

The ruling noted that “from the outset of the case, the defendant stated that when an individual described as a Mossad officer was in contact with him, he refrained from providing any information about military installations and, from the very beginning, reported the matter to the relevant authorities by calling police lines 113 or 110, but those authorities took no action. He also stated that once he realised the foreign individual was requesting information beyond tourism matters, he severed contact with that person. These points are also reflected in the investigating officer’s report.”

The Supreme Court further stated that “from the beginning through to the final report of the reporting authority, the opposing party was never definitively identified as the Zionist regime, and phrases such as ‘it appears’ were used throughout. This casts serious doubt on the attribution of cooperation with the Zionist regime to the appellant. Furthermore, the materials and images the defendant sent to the foreign individual do not clearly, documentably, or demonstrably fall within the scope of Article 6 of the Law on Countering the Hostile Acts of the Zionist Regime, such that the penalty prescribed in that article could be applied to the defendant.”

On that basis, the Supreme Court found the defendant’s conduct to fall under Article 508 of the Islamic Penal Code and, given the non-armed nature of the act, concluded that it also did not constitute an instance of “enmity against God” (moharebeh).

Citing these considerations, the court quashed the sentence under appeal and, pursuant to Clause 4 of Article 469 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, referred the case to a parallel branch for retrial.

Karimpour, in a letter published by the KHRN on 31 December 2025, had provided harrowing details of his arrest, interrogation, and judicial proceedings.

He described spending more than two months at the Ministry of Intelligence detention centre in Orumiyeh under inhumane conditions, subjected to severe physical and psychological pressure to produce forced confessions about “cooperation with Mossad agents and the transmission of intelligence data.”

Karimpour was denied access to a lawyer until his case was sent to Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh.

His trial session was held via video conference in mid-October 2025, and even during that hearing he was not allowed effective defend himself. The court, presided over by Judge Sajjad Dousti, convicted him of “spreading corruption on earth” (efsad-e fel-arz) through alleged “espionage for Israel” in a process that, according to his own account, lasted fewer than 15 minutes.

The Azerbaijani Turkic Yarsan citizen stated that the material underpinning the espionage charges had been produced under torture and at the dictation of interrogators, and that he held no position giving him access to government, military, or security facilities, nor to any ordinary, confidential, or classified information. He categorically denied transmitting any information to any person or institution.

The families of both men have gone to Orumiyeh Central Prison since the executions were confirmed by state media, but officials have continued to refuse to hand over the bodies.