Ehsan Afrashteh

Ehsan Afrashteh was a political prisoner secretly executed at Urmia prison in northwestern Iran on 13 May 2026, on wartime espionage charges. His execution was documented by Hengaw as part of a cluster of three secret political executions across 11-13 May, which compressed Iran's wartime espionage-charge pipeline from one execution per week to one every 16 hours. Hengaw reported that Afrashteh's family received notification after the fact; no public trial or judicial notice preceded the execution.

The Urmia location places Afrashteh in the West Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran, a predominantly Kurdish and Azerbaijani region. Along with Abduljalil Shahbakhsh — a Baloch detainee executed at Zahedan the previous day — Afrashteh's case is consistent with Hengaw's observation that ethnic-minority political prisoners are being processed faster than ethnic-Persian cases. The ethnic-minority clustering across two executions within 24 hours (Zahedan for Baloch, Urmia for Kurdish-Azerbaijani northwest) suggests a systematic geographic spread of the wartime suppression campaign.

With Afrashteh's execution, Hengaw's wartime register exceeded 30 documented secret political executions — the threshold beyond which UN special procedures have historically opened formal investigations. The three-execution cluster of 11-13 May was the densest 48-hour period in the record, raising the rate of wartime political executions to the level of a consistent industrial-scale operation rather than isolated reprisals.