Iran executed Mojtaba Kian on Sunday 24 May, the first person publicly put to death for espionage during this war 1. The judiciary's Mizan news agency said Kian had transmitted the location of defence-industry sites to satellite television networks affiliated with the enemy, and that one Iranian installation was struck after his information passed. The judiciary also confiscated Kian's assets.
Kian was arrested in March, during the war itself. From arrest to execution took under 50 days, the fastest case in the wartime judicial record that the monitor Hengaw and Amnesty International have tracked since the spring. There is no functioning appeal in these cases; the Naqadeh executions on Thursday 21 May ran the same minutes-long trial pattern , and the Torbat-e Heydarieh register documents the same wartime acceleration .
Mizan published the case proactively, on the same day Trump announced a peace deal. The judiciary rarely names the operational damage a defendant caused; naming the struck site turns the announcement into calibrated deterrence aimed at Iran's defence complex, not the public. The message inside Iran is that the execution clock runs faster than any negotiation, even as Tehran's mediators tell Pakistan the war is nearly over.
Hengaw, the Norway-based monitor that has tracked the war's executions throughout, corroborated the hanging 2. Amnesty has placed Iran's 2026 execution count above 200 since mid-May, on a pace it calls the highest in 44 years.
