Iran executed Gholamreza Khani Shakarab, a Turkish national, on Tuesday 26 May on charges of spying for Israel, the Norway-based Kurdish rights monitor Hengaw reported1. His death resolves the imminent-execution flag carried since 21 May and makes him the third foreign national executed since 20 May. Ankara, a NATO member that shares a long border with Iran, has not publicly protested the killing of its own citizen.
The same window logged a cluster. Hengaw documented Saman Ebrahimi and Ali Shahbazi at Kermanshah, Amirabbas Shokri at Rasht, and Abdolghader Rasouli, a Kurdish prisoner, at Mahabad on 26 May, with Majid Shirzadi executed at Hamedan on Wednesday 27 May2. Kurdish trader Qazi Kavani was shot dead by Iranian forces near Sardasht on Monday 25 May.
The pace tracks an Amnesty International register that passed 200 executions for the year. That run includes Esma Zarei, hanged at Ardabil after giving birth in custody, and Abbas Akbari Feyzabadi at Isfahan. The killings cluster in the Kurdish west and fall heavily on minority prisoners, the population with the least voice in any deal struck in Doha.
The enforcement tempo did not bend to the diplomatic track. While the war cabinet talked ceasefire abroad, the gallows kept their schedule at home, which reads as Tehran signalling that negotiation buys no leniency for the people inside its prisons.
