Hengaw, the Norway-registered Kurdish human rights monitor, documented on 18-19 May 2026 that Iranian authorities had denied the families of two secretly executed Kurdish prisoners, Naser Bakrzadeh and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, the right to receive their bodies. Hengaw also reported that Kurdish writer Majid Karimi was detained in Tehran on 19 May after an intelligence raid on his home1.
The Karimi detention extends a targeting pattern Hengaw has been mapping in real time. Shiraz lawyer Bahar Sahraeian was arrested on 17 May while performing her professional legal duties, and four Kurdish residents had been picked up across northwestern Iran on 16 May with a fifth detained in Urmia on 15 May. Writers, lawyers and Kurdish civic professionals are the population the monitor's wartime tracking now repeatedly catches in security raids, separate from the broader execution caseload Hengaw has documented since in mid-May.
Hengaw's body-denial reporting adds a new procedural element to the wartime execution pipeline. Iran's espionage-charge prosecutions of Kurdish detainees, which Hengaw has been logging across multiple provinces, has so far run through sentencing, secret execution and family notification. Withholding the bodies removes the last public-facing waypoint of that process; families cannot conduct funerary rites, cannot independently confirm cause of death, and cannot challenge the official record. The administrative withdrawal of the corpse converts a documented execution into a disappearance, and the documentation Hengaw publishes from Sulaymaniyah is, for now, the only external record that the two men were executed at all.
