Five Ahwazi Arab prisoners at risk of imminent execution

Ahwazna

 Farhad Afsharnya, the regime’s supposed Chief Justice for the AL- Ahwaz region, announced the imminent public execution of five Ahwazi prisoners accused of shooting at a police checkpoint in Hamidieh city.

According to the IRIB news agency, Afsharnya said that the five accused men would stand trial as soon as possible for the shooting near Hamidieh before being publicly executed. 

The names of these Ahwazi Arab prisoners are Qais Obeidawi, Hamood Obeidawi,  Mohammad Helfi, Mehdi Moarabi and Mehdi Sayahi.

The legal proceedings are widely expected to be another farcical kangaroo trial simply providing supposed legitimacy to the regime’s campaign of persecution of Ahwazi peoples.   

Reacting to the latest announcements, Ahwazi human rights groups have once again condemned the Iranian regime’s barbaric public executions, which are escalating as the regime intensifies its savage repression of ethnic minorities, particularly Ahwazi Arab people, and calling for a swift reaction from the international community.

The rights groups pointed out that the primary goal of such executions is to intimidate further and terrorise Ahwazi Arabs into silence and submission following a wave of protests for freedom and human rights which have swept the Ahwazi and Kurdish regions.

We urge the international community to condemn the severe and murderous injustice and repression inflicted on ethnic minority groups in Iran, whose only ‘crime’ is to demand the fundamental human rights which are accorded to all peoples by the UN’s founding charter.

  Many sources have confirmed that the regime is escalating the already extremely high rates of arrests and execution in order to terrorize and intimidate the people back into silence in order to control the unrest and quash protests which threaten the future and geographical integrity of the totalitarian theocratic regime’s so-called state.

 It is urgent that the United Nations take a stand and urge Iran to immediately desist from its oppression and violence and to respect the fundamental human and civil rights of Ahwazi Arabs, including the right to Arabic Education, employment, assembly, association and expression. Please use all possible means to urge Iran to respect the right to freedom of speech, assembly, and association as set forth by international rights standards. Please use your authority to force Iran to stop its government-sanctioned policy of racial segregation, oppression and brutality immediately. It is humanitarian imperative to place additional pressure campaign on Iran to set free all prisoners of conscience and protesters detained during these demonstrations.  Silence is complicity.