Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat were executed at dawn on Monday 3 August, reportedly at Urmia Central Prison in Iran's north-west, on charges of spying for Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, according to the Kurdish rights organisation Hengaw1. Hengaw, which monitors Iranian executions from Norway, says both men were accused of passing coordinates and images of military sites to Israeli intelligence and to the London-based broadcaster Iran International, that confessions were reportedly taken under torture in solitary confinement, and that neither man had counsel of his choice, family visits or a public trial2. It could not confirm whether either family has been given a body. Hengaw remains the only source for every element of that account.
These two cases sit on a different track from the hangings this file has followed since spring. Arvin Kheirkhahan, executed at Shahrud on 1 August, was convicted of moharebeh, waging war against God, on charges arising from the January 2026 protest wave. Behzad and Safvat were detained during the war itself and charged under the wartime espionage provisions of Iran's penal code, which carry the death penalty. Same gallows, different legal pipeline, and the second one has no street protest behind it to generate names and dates from outside.
The two tracks converge on procedure. Hengaw counted 67 executions in July with only eight acknowledged by the state, and on its account the same pattern holds here: no published docket, no advance notice to families, no judgment on the record. A family whose first reliable notice of a capital case is the instruction to collect a body has had the appeal window, the clemency campaign and the diplomatic intervention closed before any of them could open. Those are the mechanisms that have occasionally saved Iranian prisoners, and none of them can operate on a case nobody outside the prison knows about.
Iran's judiciary has published nothing on either man. That cuts both ways for a reader: the state's version cannot be tested, and neither can Hengaw's be verified from outside the country.
