In the early hours of August 6, 2025, Iran carried out the executions of Rouzbeh Vadi, a nuclear physicist accused of espionage for Israel, and Mehdi Asgharzadeh, an alleged ISIS affiliate, in what has become an increasingly systematic pattern of state executions of individuals on national security grounds. The executions were officially announced by Mizan News Agency, the media outlet affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, and have since drawn sharp attention from domestic and international observers, including human rights organizations who have criticized due process deficiencies in the cases, including lack of transparency, allegations of torture and limiting the defendants’ access to lawyers.
These executions mark a critical escalation in the use of capital punishment in Iran. As of mid-2025, the number of total executions in the Islamic Republic exceeded 617, with a substantial proportion involving charges such as “enmity against God,” “corruption on Earth,” and “espionage”—charges often criticized by international legal experts for their vagueness and susceptibility to abuse.
Rouzbeh Vadi, a roughly 40-year-old nuclear engineer with a PhD in Reactor Engineering from AmirKabir University of Technology, was employed at the Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute, a body tied to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. His arrest date was not made public, though the Iran Human Rights Organization indicates that Vadi was arrested a year and a half ago and later sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court on charges of “espionage for Israel.” According to judiciary sources, Vadi allegedly provided sensitive classified information to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and was executed after his conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. He had reportedly published a scientific paper in 2011 with two prominent Iranian nuclear scientists—Abdolhamid MinooCher and Ahmad Zolfaghari—both of whom were killed during the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025.
The Iranian judiciary detailed a dramatic account of Vadi’s alleged espionage activities. According to official court narratives and self-incriminating confessions—whose authenticity and voluntariness remain unverified by independent sources—Vadi was recruited via encrypted digital platforms, trained in secure communications, and traveled to Vienna on five separate occasions to meet with Mossad operatives under elaborate protocols involving physical searches, use of disguises, digital wallets for compensation, and counter-surveillance tactics. He was reportedly tasked with weekly data extraction from within Iran’s nuclear establishment and passed information to Mossad in exchange for cryptocurrency. The judiciary further claimed that Vadi disclosed the identities and internal activities of Iranian nuclear scientists, including those who were later assassinated. His behavior was characterized as “deliberate,” “calculated,” and “deeply compromising to internal and external national security.”
Vadi was reportedly arrested in Tehran upon returning from one of his foreign assignments following intense surveillance. The indictment charged him with “conscious and paid collaboration with a hostile intelligence agency” under Article 6 of the Law on Countering Hostile Israeli Actions Against Peace and Security, alongside multiple provisions of the Islamic Penal Code. After the judicial process, including a failed appeal, his execution was carried out.
On the same morning, Mehdi Asgharzadeh, a 35 year-old Kurdish inmate held for nearly a decade, was also hanged. He was accused of receiving paramilitary training in Syria and Iraq and plotting terrorist attacks on Iranian soil in affiliation with ISIS. According to Hengaw, Asgharzadeh was arrested in Javanrud in 2016 (1395) after returning from Syria, placed in two years of solitary confinement in Tehran, and then transferred to Dizelabad Prison in Kermanshah, where he spent the next eight years. In 2023, he was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court in Kermanshah on charges of “corruption on earth through extensive involvement with the terrorist and Takfiri group ISIS and actions against national public security,” and the sentence was twice upheld by the Supreme Court. His body was reportedly not returned to his family, a practice frequently condemned by human rights groups for its psychological and cultural cruelty.
These executions come against a backdrop of intense post-war insecurity. Following the June 2025 conflict with Israel, a series of assassinations targeting Iranian scientists, and continued external pressure over Iran’s nuclear program and regional domestic policies. Within this environment, the boundaries between legitimate national security and punitive state repression appear increasingly blurred, especially in cases lacking transparency and independent oversight.