Iran hanged Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi at dawn on Tuesday, July 28, the third and fourth executions carried out in the Isfahan case that has become a focal point of the country’s post-protest crackdown. The judiciary-affiliated Mizan news agency and the state news agency IRNA announced that the two men, reported as 23 and 28 years old by IranWire, and 24 and 27 by Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO), had been convicted over the killing of four law-enforcement officers at Shahid Alikhani Square in Isfahan’s Malekshahr district on January 8, 2026 (18 Dey 1404). Two other defendants in the case, Erfan Esfandiari, 19, and Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, a 24-year-old Afghan national, were executed on July 19. Video from the scene and rights groups indicated Tuesday’s hangings were carried out before onlookers at the square itself, which IHRNGO called Iran’s first public executions of 2026.
Four officers died violently at Alikhani Square that January night, in the middle of the deadliest unrest Iran has seen in years. The December 2025-January 2026 protests began over surging prices and a collapse of the rial and were crushed on January 8 and 9 at an enormous human cost on both sides: more than 3,000 Iranians were killed by the government’s own count and thousands more according to other tallies. Casualty figures vary widely — from the official count of 3,117, to HRANA’s 6,724 confirmed protester deaths including 236 children, to claims of 12,000 to 50,000 made by various international outlets, U.S. officials and the exiled son of the last Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. Only two of these counts are backed by published names: the government’s list of 2,986 and HRANA’s, which identifies just over 4,000 victims by name and detail. The larger figures have circulated without names or case records attached.
Over the same two days of the crackdown, more than 100 police, security and paramilitary personnel were also killed. This represents roughly half of the 207 government-related forces who were killed amid the protests. The four men who died at the square – Hossein Ramezani, Mohammad Hemmati, Seyed Ali Khoshou’i and Valiollah Safari – were, in the official account, unarmed officers sent to restore order who were surrounded by a crowd, beaten with stones and blades, doused in gasoline and burned. Leaked audio attributed to unencrypted police radio traffic that night, whose authenticity has not been established, is consistent with officers being overwhelmed and besieged, pleading for ammunition and reinforcements. Verified reporting from the same nights also documents protesters killed by birdshot and live fire in the district, including a 17-year-old, Mehrad Sadeghi, who was shot dead in Malekshahr.
The judiciary presented Sepahi Badjani and Hosseinabadi as principal perpetrators of the officers’ deaths, and says their convictions rested on a substantial evidentiary record. According to the Judiciary’s Media Center, that record included police intelligence reports, data extracted from the defendants’ phones, a reconstruction of the crime scene, witness testimony and the defendants’ own confessions. Sepahi was accused of wielding an axe and knife, calling for gasoline and taking a direct part in burning two officers, and Safari was accused of entering the square masked with a machete and striking a wounded officer.
Both Sepahi Badjani and Hosseinabadi were convicted of armed rebellion (baghi), “waging war against God” (moharebeh) and “corruption on earth” (efsad-fil-arz). The sentences, issued by Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court under Judge Mohammad-Reza Tavakoli, were upheld by the Supreme Court according to Iranian media. The judiciary maintains that court sessions were held with the defendants and their lawyers present and that their defenses were heard and rejected. The Iranian judiciary it routinely denies allegations of torture or coerced confessions in security-related cases, despite significant evidence to the contrary.
Rights organizations and sources close to the families contest nearly every element of the authorities’ account, describing a mass prosecution conducted largely out of sight. By the tallies of IHRNGO and the Committee for Following Up on the Situation of Detainees, some 59 people were arrested in a sweep after the killings, and 12 to 14 men aged 18 to 28 were sentenced to death under a joint indictment. Accounts of the remaining defendants diverge, with BBC Persian reporting that 23 were acquitted while IranWire reported that at least 23 received prison terms of five to ten years. Rights groups allege that many defendants were tried remotely from prison by phone or video link without counsel beside them, that families were barred from hiring lawyers of their choosing while court-appointed lawyers lacked access to the classified file, and that confessions – aired on state television with blurred faces months before the trials ended – were extracted under torture, including by electric shock and mock execution. Sources close to several families say they had evidence their relatives were not present when the officers were killed, which the court declined to accept. None of these claims, nor the state’s account of the trials, can be independently verified, since no outside observer had access to the proceedings.
What the publicly available evidence actually shows remains genuinely unresolved. The footage Iranian outlets have aired includes city surveillance video of motorcycles burning, and a few seconds of distant imagery said to show officers’ bodies being struck. This evidence was filmed at night, from a distance, with the figures masked and relatives have argued the defendants cannot be identified in it. Independent outlets that reviewed the material reached the same conclusion about its limits, with BBC Persian stating it could neither confirm nor refute the defendants’ involvement in the officers’ deaths. That ambiguity cuts in both directions: the available public material neither corroborates the judiciary’s identification of these specific men, nor establishes their innocence. What it does establish is that a brutal killing of officers took place, and that the state’s case for who carried it out appears to rest primarily on confessions whose circumstances are disputed.
The decision to stage the hangings in public produced something Isfahan had not seen in months: a crowd back in the street. After images of scaffolding being erected at the square spread on Monday evening, residents converged on Alikhani Square through the night in an attempt to stop the executions. The sizable gathering represents one of the first open street protests in the city since the January crackdown and the war that followed, though it drew government supporters as well. Sources and video from the scene indicate that security units on motorcycles and in armored vehicles dispersed protesters with tear gas, paintball rounds, stun guns and shots fired into the air as chants of “bi-sharaf” (“dishonorable”) rose, with injuries and arrests reported and internet disruptions across Isfahan.
Witnesses at the square gave conflicting accounts of whether the hangings occurred there or after the area was cleared, at around 4:45 a.m. The bodies have reportedly not been returned to the families. Whether the judiciary anticipated that a public execution would itself become a rallying point is unknown, but official announcements avoided calling the executions public even as state agencies such as Mehr reported they were carried out “in the presence of the people.” BBC Persian reported that some outlets later removed such references. That retreat from the framing of a public execution may reflect a recognition of the effect the spectacle produced, though this should be treated as a possibility rather than an established fact.
The hangings proceeded a day after UN experts publicly demanded they be halted, and the fate of the remaining condemned men is now the immediate question. Mai Sato, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, said UN experts had condemned the twelve death sentences and urged an immediate stop to the executions, citing coerced confessions. The UN Fact-Finding Mission had issued a similar call earlier.
Four days before the hangings, on July 24, the Council of the European Union sanctioned five Revolutionary Court judges, including the presiding judge in the case, Mohammad-Reza Tavakoli of Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court. The Council’s rationale did not cite the Alikhani Square case specifically, but rather politically-motivated trials of dissidents and religious minorities, including Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi. Eight to ten defendants in the case remain on death row, several of them 18 or 19 years old. Human rights groups say one or two were minors at the time of the events.
The signals that preceded Tuesday’s hangings are now repeating: the activist Mehdi Mahmoudian wrote that families of some of the remaining condemned men have been summoned to the prison for a “final visit.” Iran Human Rights Monitor reported on July 30 that the families of 20 year-old Ghaem Hosseini (a cousin of the executed Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi); 19 year-old Amirhossein Maleki; and 19 year-old Ali Dashti had received such summonses. Opposition-affiliated outlets, citing prison sources, reported that several of the condemned had been moved to solitary confinement after final visits and that fellow inmates at Isfahan’s Dastgerd Prison had begun a hunger strike in protest — claims that could not be independently verified. Among those still at risk is Sepahi Badjani’s cousin Alireza Sepahi, 25, whom pre-dawn reports had named as a third man to be executed on Tuesday before official announcements listed only two. Rights groups say he was returned to prison after the hangings.
The brutality of the crime at the center of this case makes due process all the more important, yet like many high profile political and security-related cases there are significant, widespread concerns that Iran’s judiciary is proceeding in a manner contrary to its obligations under international law. A death sentence is irreversible, and there appears to be little concrete evidence implicating those condemned for allegedly committing the crime. The process documented in this case – a joint indictment covering dozens of people, confessions aired on state television before the trials concluded, defendants reportedly barred from choosing their own lawyers while court-appointed counsel was denied access to the files, and hangings carried out within weeks of the Supreme Court’s confirmation and a day after UN experts appealed for a halt – cannot demonstrate to anyone outside it who actually killed those officers. That is a failure that serves no one: not the accused, and not the families of the slain, who are owed verdicts capable of withstanding examination rather than verdicts delivered at speed.
Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei has publicly instructed prosecutors to handle protest and wartime cases “without leniency” and to carry out sentences swiftly. By IranWire’s count, at least 26 protesters have been executed in connection with the January unrest since March 18, underscoring the rapid pace at which Iran is executing those accused of wrongdoing amid the protest movement and associated unrest.
NIAC is deeply disturbed by these executions which followed severe doubts about the due process afforded to the accused, and calls on Iran to abstain from further executions while moving immediately to uphold its rights obligations in full. Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which obligates it to ensure accused individuals have the right to a fair trial with an attorney of their choosing and prohibits forced confessions and the use of torture. None of these obligations appear to have been afforded to the accused in this case. With more families now being summoned for final visits, the remaining defendants – several of them teenagers at the time of the events, at least one reportedly a minor – face the same flawed legal process, on the same rushed timetable. Whatever they did or did not do on January 8, authorities have a duty to establish the truth beyond a reasonable doubt in a trial that can be seen and tested. That is the minimum owed before a life is taken, but nothing in the record so far shows that standard has been met.