Hengaw, the Norway-based Kurdish human rights monitor, documented three judicial executions in Iran on 19 May 2026 1. Ebrahim Farhadi Topkanlou was hanged at Torbat-e Heydarieh Prison in Khorasan Razavi province on a narcotics conviction. Saeid Rahmanirad and an unnamed third defendant met the same fate at Shiraz Prison the same day, the murder charge cited for Rahmanirad.
The Torbat-e Heydarieh execution extends the wartime judicial geography beyond the prison register Hengaw had previously documented for the conflict logged Birjand, Tabriz, Kerman and Gorgan. For Iran's Kurdish, Baluch and provincial minorities, that means the death-penalty pipeline is now reaching further from Tehran than at any point since 28 February.
State security officers also detained Majid Karimi, a Kurdish writer, at his Tehran home on 19 May. The arrest follows Hengaw's 18-19 May body-denial and writer-detention dossier , and indicates a continuing security operation rather than a single arrest. Shiraz lawyer Bahar Sahraeian was detained on 17 May . Two state tracks are running in parallel on the same day: capital charges through the judicial pipeline for espionage and narcotics, and administrative intelligence-service detention targeting cultural figures and civil society.
