3 rioters face death penalty in Iran

November 16, 2022 - 22:22

TEHRAN- Tehran Revolutionary Court has sentenced 3 rioters to death over their roles in ransacking public properties and killing security personnel, the court said on Wednesday.

Following the trial of rioters and security disruptors, a preliminary verdict was issued for three more rioters in the presence of their lawyers. The verdicts are open to appeal.

According to the verdicts, one of the convicts was involved in a terrorist act by attacking police officers with his car and trying to kill them.

A policeman was killed, as a result, which left several others injured. Based on his own confessions and conclusive evidence, he was charged with violating national security and damaging public properties.

What he did was to foment insecurity in the country by wreaking havoc on public possessions. Also, the second verdict was issued for a person who tried to cause intimidation by drawing a cold weapon to attack security guards in a bid to kill them. Furthermore, he was charged to create terror and insecurity for the country.

Another reason of his death sentence was setting governorate of Pakdasht city ablaze and plundering public properties. The third one, who tried to shut down the streets and thwart the moving of vehicle, faced death penalty. He also inflicted damage on buildings and other properties. Riots in Iran have claimed lives of several security guards and even certain ordinary people.

 security defenders and a cleric martyred in Tehran, Shiraz, Kamyaran, Bukan

On Tuesday evening, Hojatoleslam Mohammad Zareh Movaydi, an Imam prayer in Shiraz, was also severely injured by rioters with a Molotov cocktail and died in the hospital due to the severity of injuries. During the riots on Tuesday evening, Reza Azarbar, one of the security guards, was also shot dead by unknown rioters in the city of Kamyaran and two others wounded.

The body of another defender of security, named Reza Almasi, was carried to his hometown of Shahin Dej for burial on Wednesday.

As a native of Shahin Dej, he was a member of IRGC who was fatally attacked in the wake of the riots orchestrated by anti-revolutionary agents in Bukan. As a campaign of false news against the Islamic Republic ramps up, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has joined the chorus of social media trolls spreading a flagrant untruth.

On Monday evening, Trudeau tweeted that Canada "condemns the Iranian regime's brutal decision to execute almost 15,000 protesters."

He added, “These heroic Iranians were fighting for their human rights, and we continue to stand together in their support and in opposition to the regime's atrocious crimes."

However, within that tweet is a false assumption that Iran intends to execute "almost 15,000 demonstrators" arrested in the aftermath of street protests and violent rallies prompted in mid-September by yet another piece of fake news - the purported police killing of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini.

Despite being instantly denounced as untrue by multiple Twitter users, Trudeau's message stayed up for more than 11 hours and was shared thousands of times before being deleted.

The Canadian prime minister may have been the most significant person to spread the false information, but the unbelievable falsehood enabled numerous others to join in and criticize the Islamic Republic, whether on purpose or accidentally. Specifically, an infographic claiming that "Iran sentences 15,000 demonstrators to death — as a 'painful lesson' for all dissidents" went popular on Twitter and Instagram. Many well-known people believed the hoax and spread it to their followers.

The Washington Post published an article claiming that Iran is poised to execute a young Iranian man accused of lighting a trash can on fire during a protest. It is worth saying that he was not sentenced to death for such a petty crime but instead on felony charges.

He perpetrated murder and ransacked the public properties so as to procure terror in the country. Iranian social media has been inundated with false reports over the past two months, many of which originate from Persian news outlets with foreign bases, such as the BBC Persian, Voice of America (VOA), Manoto TV in London, Radio Farda, the Saudi-funded Iran International news network, and thousands of bots and trolls under the control of the anti-Iran terrorist organization Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) and Western intelligence agencies.

At least 38,000 incorrect or misleading pieces on the Islamic Republic were published by the five media sites listed earlier this month, according to a report by Iran's Fars news agency earlier this month. Top of the list with 13,579 bogus reports was Iran International. Midway through September, after the contentious death of Mahsa Amini, riots erupted in Iran.

The 22-year-old fell down inside a police station in Tehran, the country's capital, and was eventually declared dead at a hospital three days later.

According to an official assessment by Iran's Forensic Medicine Organization, Amini died from a disease rather than blows to her head or other critical organs.

Meanwhile, rioters have been rampaging around the country with strong backing from Western nations, including the United States, despite viciously assaulting security personnel and actively damaging public property.

On October 28, the Iranian Intelligence Ministry and the IRGC Intelligence Organization issued a joint statement to emphasize the significant role that foreign spy agencies, particularly the CIA, had in orchestrating the violent insurgencies. The Intelligence Ministry revealed late last month that Western governments and its mercenary media had supported the riots, spreading false information and distorting the chain of events that resulted in Amini's death even before the official inquiry into the incident was completed.