Iran executes seven over killings of security forces, cleric

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DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran on Saturday executed seven men convicted of killing security personnel and a cleric several years ago, the judiciary’s news agency Mizan reported.

Six of the men were ethnic Arab separatists accused of carrying out armed attacks and bombings in Khorramshahr, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, that killed four security forces. The seventh, Saman Mohammadi Khiyareh, a Kurd, was convicted over the 2009 assassination of Mamousta Sheikh al-Islam, a pro-government Sunni cleric in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.

Mizan said the men had links to Israel, a charge that rights groups say Tehran routinely uses against ethnic minorities to portray dissent as foreign-backed rather than homegrown.

Activists have also questioned Mohammadi Khiyareh’s case, noting he was only 15 or 16 at the time of the assassination, arrested at 19, and held for more than a decade before his execution. His conviction, they said, relied on confessions extracted under torture — a practice activists accuse Iranian courts of using regularly.

According to Amnesty International, Iranian authorities have executed more than 1,000 people so far in 2025, the highest annual figure recorded by the group in at least 15 years.

(Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; Editing by William Mallard and Susan Fenton)