Arvin Kheirkhahan, 20, was executed at dawn on Saturday 1 August at Shahrud Central Prison in Semnan province, roughly 400km east of Tehran, according to Hengaw1. He had been arrested during the January 2026 protests and convicted of moharebeh, waging war against God, the charge Iranian courts routinely bring in political capital cases. His family was given no warning; they were told to collect his body at dawn the following day2.
The same sequence ran a fortnight earlier and one province away, when Mohammad Amini Dehaghani was hanged at Isfahan over an arson charge from those same protests with no public record of his arrest or trial. Two cases do not make a policy, but they do make a procedure: detain during unrest, try without a docket, execute without notice, return the body.
A moharebeh conviction carries a mandatory death sentence and is reached in Iran's Revolutionary Courts, whose proceedings are closed and whose judgments are frequently not published, so a conviction can be reached, appealed and carried out without a single public filing. That is what forecloses intervention. A campaign needs a name, a charge and a date, and Kheirkhahan's family had none of them until it was over.
