Hengaw, the Norway-based Kurdish human rights monitor, documented three secret executions across 11-13 May 2026: aerospace researcher Shakourzadeh at Qezel Hesar on 11 May, Baloch detainee Abduljalil Shahbakhsh at Zahedan on 12 May (55 days after his arrest), and political prisoner Ehsan Afrashteh at Urmia on 13 May on espionage charges1. Three in two days exceeds the 13 secret political executions Hengaw documented across the prior six weeks. The wartime espionage-charge pipeline has compressed from roughly one execution per week to one every 16 hours, even as the Norway-based monitor's reporting cadence has not kept up.
Iran's wartime espionage charge sequence runs from arrest through Revolutionary Court conviction to secret execution at a non-Tehran prison, with families notified after the fact. The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) provides the charging framework: the wartime moharebeh ("enmity against God") variant treats domestic dissent in occupied or contested geography as constructively in service of the Israeli operational map, collapsing the evidentiary threshold that pre-war espionage cases required. Najmeh Amini, charged in Mashhad on 9 May for a 2022-era social media post, was the first case under this framing the briefing tracked.
Shahbakhsh's 55-day arrest-to-execution interval matches the window observed in the Bakrzadeh and Karimpour cases, suggesting the Revolutionary Court system is now processing wartime moharebeh files on a fortnightly cadence. The Baloch-Kurdish profile of the new cluster indicates ethnic-minority political prisoners are being processed faster than ethnic-Persian cases. Hengaw's wartime register now exceeds 30 documented secret political executions, the threshold beyond which UN special procedures have historically opened formal investigations.
