Police in Iran execute five people for drug smuggling

 

Five people were executed to death by Iranian police on Monday for violent drug smuggling in the south of the nation, according to the court.

According to Mojtaba Ghahramani, Chief Justice of the southern province of Hormozgan, the prisoners had been found to be "all criminals and armed drug smugglers" and had received death-by-hanging sentences upheld by Iran's highest court.

He said, "The sentences of the aforementioned were executed this morning in Bandar Abbas and Minab prisons."

With the most recent hangings, eight individuals have been hanged for drug smuggling in less than a week. Following UN warnings about the "frighteningly" high number of executions in the nation, the judiciary killed three drug cartel defendants on Wednesday.

Human rights organizations, notably Amnesty International, claim that Iran kills more people each year than any other country outside China.

In a rare conviction for desecrating the Quran and insulting the Prophet Mohammed, Iran also hanged two people on Monday. This drew censure from the US and outrage from human rights organizations.

Volker Turk, the UN's human rights head, raised concern on Tuesday over Iran's "abominable" record this year, in which more than 10 prisoners have received death sentences on average each week.

Although the UN claimed the true figure is likely far higher, more than 210 individuals have already been put to death in Iran this year, most of them for drug-related offenses.

According to a study released in April by the organizations Together Against the Death Penalty and Iran Human Rights, both located in Paris and Norway, the regime executed 75% more individuals in 2022 than the year before.

According to the two rights organizations, at least 582 individuals were put to death in Iran last year, which is a significant increase from the 333 reported in 2021 and the biggest number of executions since 2015.