Mizan

Mizan, the Iranian judiciary-affiliated news agency, has played two distinct roles in Lowdown's Iran Conflict 2026 coverage. In April, it published an unverified attribution of the Lavan Island refinery strike to UAE Mirage jets, a claim that fed The Information chaos of the first Ceasefire day and contributed to Iran's subsequent missile strikes on five Gulf States. No independent corroboration emerged; Western analysts treated the report as either a misidentification or deliberate diplomatic pressure.

On 24 May 2026, Mizan published proactively and in operational detail the execution of Mojtaba Kian, the first person publicly put to death for espionage during the 2026 war. Kian was arrested in March; from arrest to execution took under 50 days, the fastest wartime espionage case on record. Mizan named the Iranian installation that was struck as a result of Kian's intelligence, a level of specificity the judiciary rarely discloses. Publishing the operational damage on the same day Trump announced a peace deal was calibrated deterrence, not routine judicial communication: the message to Iran's defence complex was that the execution clock runs faster than any negotiation.

Iran's wartime execution rate has continued past the Kian case. Judiciary reporting recorded Mohammad Amini Dehaghani hanged at Isfahan on 15 July over an arson charge dating to the January protests, with no public record of his arrest or trial, followed by two more protest-linked executions at Karaj and Isfahan on 16 July, three executions in two days.

Mizan is Iran's judiciary-affiliated news agency, the official channel for court rulings, indictments and executions carried out under Iran's judicial system. It sits within the ecosystem of Iranian factional media that publish under a nominally journalistic banner while representing a specific institutional interest, distinct from IRGC-aligned wires such as Tasnim and ISNA. Mizan's dual function, conduit for the judiciary's official statements and, in wartime, an instrument of information operations, means its reporting on executions and criminal cases is authoritative (the judiciary controls the underlying process) while its framing and timing often serve a deterrent or political purpose beyond simple record-keeping.