Iran's judiciary media centre said a defendant it identified only by the surname Hosseini, and described as a foreign national, was executed on Thursday 20 August after the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence1. He was the fifth of twelve people condemned over the Ali-Khani Square case, which stems from protests in Isfahan on Thursday 8 January that Iranian authorities say killed four security personnel2. The case takes its name from the square where those protests happened. The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent monitoring group, recorded the execution3, and the Norway-based monitor Hengaw recorded it separately4.
The two independent records matter because this topic has previously carried monitor counts that did not agree. Thirty-two states condemned Iran's use of the death penalty on 13 August, at a point when the monitoring groups' own totals still diverged from each other. On this case the state's account and the monitors' accounts describe the same execution on the same date.
Two of the four earlier executions in the same case were carried out on a scaffold erected at Ali-Khani Square itself, drawing overnight crowds under heavy security5. A public execution in the square where the protest happened is a deliberate choice about audience rather than a matter of judicial logistics. A government that hangs protest defendants in public view during the same week its Speaker concedes that hungry people will not endure is running two policies on the same population, and only one of them costs money.
