Prison authorities hanged two Kurdish prisoners, Ashkan Maleki and Mehrdad Mohammadinia, at dawn on Monday 1 June inside Ghezel Hesar prison in Karaj, the same day Iran suspended talks with Washington1. Both were arrested during the January 2026 protests and sentenced on moharebeh charges, an Iranian capital offence meaning "waging war against God". Families were denied a final visit and the bodies were withheld. Their co-defendant Arman Marefati, 38, from Saqqez, remains at imminent risk in the Great Tehran Penitentiary.
The Hengaw rights monitor, a Norway-based Kurdish group, counts at least 36 politically motivated executions since the war began on 28 February, with 78 dissidents on death row2. The moharebeh charge requires no proven act of violence, only a court finding of waging war against God, which is why protest arrests convert to death sentences so quickly.
Iran's Revolutionary Courts answer to the judiciary chief, not the negotiators, so the gallows tempo runs uncorrelated with the diplomatic calendar by design. The phone call that halted Beirut reached Jerusalem in minutes; it never reached a cell in Karaj.
