Mehrab Abdollahzadeh

Mehrab Abdollahzadeh is a 27-year-old Kurdish “Woman, Life, Freedom” protester who worked as a barber prior to his arrest on 22 October 2022. He was subjected to 42 days of physical and psychological torture to extract confessions to injuring an IRGC member on 22 September who died in hospital three days later. Mehrab’s case was sent to Branch 1 of the Urmia Revolutionary Court after 17 months. In court, Mehrab denied the charges, stating that he had been tortured to confess, “but the judge smirked and said: ‘you’ve all learnt to say you were tortured’ and asserted that ‘none of our experts (interrogators) torture defendants, you’re all lying.’” 

After the rejection of his appeal, his lawyer, Sidad Shirzad, outlined on social media a series of substantive and procedural deficiencies in the case, stating that it was never adjudicated as a murder case nor examined on the basis of a request by the victim’s next of kin, yet a death sentence was issued not for murder but for efsad-fil-arz. He noted that while other defendants were under the legal age at the time of the alleged offence and the charge concerned murder, jurisdiction properly lay with the Juvenile Criminal Court, but despite repeated objections regarding lack of jurisdiction and the failure to address the murder charge, none of these objections were ultimately considered. These objections, raised by Mehrab Abdollahzadeh’s former lawyers and the lawyers of other defendants and recorded on pages 940, 1008, 1015, 1017, and 1052 of the case file, did not result in the case being referred either to the Juvenile Criminal Court or even to Criminal Court One. He further stated that some judicial authorities involved in the proceedings explicitly acknowledged this position, including the Deputy Prosecutor’s express recognition of the inherent jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Court and Criminal Court One on page 206, and the Juvenile Criminal Court’s acknowledgement of its own jurisdiction on page 117. In addition, he identified multiple further violations, including that the formal notification of charges was carried out in breach of legal requirements and without the presence of a lawyer, the deceased’s body was buried without an autopsy and before a forensic medical opinion was obtained, a burial permit was issued by the treating physician after hospitalisation citing kidney failure as the cause of death, and no valid legal confession was ever made by Mehrab Abdollahzadeh before an investigator or judge, as he consistently and explicitly denied striking even a single blow against the deceased. He added that neither the statements of the deceased Basij commander nor those of his fellow force member made any explicit or implicit reference to Mehrab, that the credible and corroborated statements of other defendants, witnesses, and individuals present at the crime scene likewise made no mention of him, and that the judgment of Branch 9 of the Supreme Court, at line 11 of page 6, expressly identified the central role of other defendants in the killing and the infliction of fatal injuries, thereby clearly demonstrating the absence of any role by the defendant.

The lawyer emphasised that the aforementioned represent only a small portion of the seven-volume case file. Mehrab is held in Urmia (Darya) Central Prison. 

CHARGES: Efsad-fil-arz (corruption on earth) through participation in the murder of an IRGC member.

STATUS: Sentenced to death by Branch 1 of the Urmia Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Najafzadeh on 19 September 2024. Mehrab's sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court on 20 December 2025 and an Article 474 appeal was rejected on 27 January 2026. Without a stay of execution order, Mehrab can be executed at any time in Urmia Central Prison.