Mojtaba Kian

Mojtaba Kian was hanged on Sunday 24 May 2026, becoming the first person publicly executed for espionage during the 2026 Iran war. Iran's judiciary news agency Mizan announced that he had transmitted the location of defence-industry sites to satellite television networks affiliated with the enemy, and that one Iranian installation was struck as a direct result of his intelligence. His assets were confiscated alongside the sentence.

Kian was arrested in March 2026, during the war itself. The interval from arrest to execution was under 50 days, the fastest case in the wartime judicial register tracked by Hengaw and Amnesty International since the spring. The speed distinguishes his case from earlier wartime executions: the Naqadeh double hanging in May and the Torbat-e Heydarieh register both followed a similar minutes-long trial pattern, but Kian was a wartime arrest, not a pre-war detainee. There is no functioning appeal in these cases.

Mizan's decision to publish the case proactively, naming the struck installation and the method of transmission, signals a deliberate deterrence calculation rather than routine judicial reporting. The announcement landed on the same day Trump declared a peace deal was "largely negotiated". The judiciary's message to Iran's defence and intelligence communities was that the execution clock runs faster than any negotiation now under way. Hengaw, the Norway-based Kurdish human rights monitor, corroborated the hanging independently. Amnesty International placed Iran's 2026 execution count above 200 since mid-May, on a pace it describes as the highest in 44 years.