Nasser Bakerzadeh is a 26-year-old Kurdish civilian from Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province.

After completing secondary school, he studied religious studies and subsequently opened a mobile phone shop in Orumiyeh, and at the time of his arrest he was also active in the tourism sector.

Bakerzadeh was first arrested by the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Orumiyeh on 9 August 2023. After several weeks in custody, he was temporarily released following an agreement to cooperate with Iran’s security services.

He was re-arrested by IRGC Intelligence on 2 January 2024, at the age of 23, and held for approximately three months in solitary confinement at the IRGC’s Al-Mahdi base detention centre in Orumiyeh, during which time he was subjected to severe psychological torture. He was subsequently transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison.

Bakerzadeh’s case has been marked by an exceptional legal cycle in which three successive death sentences have been issued against him, with the Supreme Court overturning the first two and explicitly citing a lack of sufficient legal evidence on each occasion.

Bakerzadeh’s first trial was held on 2 November 2024 at Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh, presided over by Judge Najafzadeh, where he was sentenced to death on charges of “espionage for Israel”.

Following an appeal by his defence lawyers Sidad Shirzad, Amir Raeisian, and Nihad Iran-Doust, Branch 39 of the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence and referred the case for retrial to another court of equal authority.

In April 2025, the Supreme Court overturned the ruling on the grounds of a lack of legal evidence and referred the case to Branch Two of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh, presided over by Judge Shahini. In summer 2025, a retrial was held and Bakerzadeh was again sentenced to death on the same charge. Branch 39 of the Supreme Court overturned this second sentence in autumn 2025, once more citing the absence of adequate legal evidence establishing espionage for Israel.

Despite the Supreme Court’s two explicit reversals, Branch Two of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh issued a third death sentence against Bakerzadeh in January 2026, under the wartime conditions. His defence lawyers were notified of this sentence on 3 February 2026. Bakerzadeh’s defence team said the third verdict was issued without Branch Two of the Islamic Revolutionary Court taking into account the multiple objections and reasoning put forward by Branch 39 of the Supreme Court.

On 25 April 2026, Branch 39 of the Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence in full. The confirmation came only 10 days after the case had been referred to the court, a speed that has raised particular concern among human rights observers. On the same day, Bakerzadeh was summoned to the sentence enforcement office of Orumiyeh Central Prison and formally notified of the decision. According to an informed source, the prison official responsible for sentence enforcement, Abdollahzadeh, threatened Bakerzadeh with imminent execution at the time of notification. When Bakerzadeh protested, the official subjected him to verbal abuse and a severe beating.

Following notification of the ruling, Bakerzadeh published an open letter from prison addressed to the Kurdish public, civil society, and international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, appealing for urgent intervention. In the letter, he identifies his Kurdish and Sunni identity as the underlying basis for his prosecution, writing: “my first ‘crime’ was being Kurdish, and after that, being Sunni.”

Bakerzadeh was secretly executed in Orumiyeh Central Prison on 2 May.

During his final telephone conversation with KHRN from Orumiyeh Central Prison, Bakerzadeh recounted how he had been abducted by unidentified armed men in the summer of 2023, approximately four to five months prior to his initial arrest. He said that he had been held in an undisclosed location and interrogated for four hours before being released on the condition that he help to capture an associate. He mentioned that, within hours of his arrest, the charge against him had been changed from “acting against national security” to “espionage for Israel”. He maintained throughout that he had himself contacted the authorities to report a man he had been approached by, the very same contact that was later used as the basis for his espionage charge.