Iran's judiciary has announced that three men — Hassan Divband, Hamid Kazemi and Reza Zanganeh — were hanged over their alleged roles in the January protests, after the Karaj Revolutionary Court sentenced them to death and ordered their assets confiscated, and the Supreme Court upheld their death sentences.
According to the judiciary, the three were convicted of taking part in operations for Israel, the United States and other "hostile groups" against Iran's national security. The charges included attacks on public and government buildings, damage to public property and electricity infrastructure, and disruption of public services during the January 8–9 protests. Divband was arrested on January 11 after a report by the Intelligence Ministry's office in Alborz province, accused of setting fire to public property and encouraging destruction. Ten other people were arrested alongside him; eight co-defendants received prison sentences of five to ten years, and proceedings to confiscate assets are continuing.
Rights groups say protest-related death sentences in Iran are being handed down after rushed proceedings built on confessions tainted by torture, and that public executions are being used to instil fear. Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center reported in September that 16 of 29 protest-related execution cases involved no allegation of killing at all. An Iran International investigation in October counted at least 70 people executed between January 7 and October 5 — 35 of them connected to the January protests, nearly two a week in political and security cases — with around 190 more people facing death sentences.
The case also reaches directly into Iran's confrontation with Washington: the regime's own charges frame the hanged men as agents of the United States and Israel, the same accusation Tehran levels at the protest movement as a whole, even as the two countries remain locked in their wider standoff over Iran's missile and nuclear programmes.
For ordinary Iranians, the hangings carry a plain message: joining a street protest can end at the gallows, and a trial can move from arrest to execution on charges that rights groups say are never properly tested. Families of the detained face the loss of their homes and property on top of the loss of their sons, while the confiscation cases against the families continue.
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