Iran: Transfer of Five Death Row Prisoners, Supporters of the PMOI, from Evin to Ghezel Hesar, the Site of Executions
Three Others Previously Transferred; Four Baluch Political Prisoners at Risk of Execution
Call for Urgent Action to Save the Lives of Political Prisoners on Death Row
This morning, Wednesday, April 16, 2025, the notorious Hedayatollah Farzadi, the criminal head of Evin Prison, announced that five political prisoners sentenced to death—Vahid Bani Amerian, Seyed Mohammad Taghavi, Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi, and Shahrokh Daneshvarkar—must be transferred from Ward 4 of Evin Prison to Ghezel Hesar Prison, by the end of the day, on orders from the criminal judge Iman Afshari. In response to prisoners’ objections to the transfer, Farzadi threatened that they would be forcibly moved using prison guards.
Following Farzadi’s orders, as of this morning, the doors of Ward 4 in Evin have been locked, and the prisoners have been isolated to prevent any protest.
These prisoners were sentenced to death in December 2024 by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Iman Afshari, on charges of “membership in the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK),” “assembly and collusion against national security,” “armed uprising against the regime,” “forming a group with the intent to disturb national security,” and “destruction of public property using a launcher weapon.” Ghezel HesarPrison is one of the main execution sites in Iran, where a number of inmates are regularly executed.
Previously, on January 26, 2025, and April 3, 2025, three other political prisoners—Behrouz Ehsani Eslamlou, Mehdi Hassani, and Seyed Abolhassan Montazer—who were sentenced to death on similar charges, were suddenly transferred from Evin to Ghezel Hesar.
Meanwhile, four Baluch political prisoners whose death sentences have been finalized are at imminent risk of execution. On April 9, 2025, the request for retrial of death-row political prisoner Abdolrahim Ghanbarzehi Gorgij was rejected. Prior to this, the Supreme Court of the regime upheld the death sentences of his three co-defendants—Eidou Shahbakhsh, Abdolghani Shahbakhsh, and Soleiman Shahbakhsh, who was only 12 years old at the time of the alleged offense—and also denied their requests for retrial.
The Iranian Resistance calls on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteurs, the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission, as well as the European Union and its member states to take urgent action to save the lives of political prisoners sentenced to death.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)
16 April 2025