Iran executes Jewish Iranian man in murder case: NGO

Iran on Monday executed a member of the country’s Jewish minority who had been convicted of murder, an NGO said, at a time of rising tensions with Israel.

Arvin Ghahremani was hanged in prison in the western city of Kermanshah after being convicted of a murder during a street fight, said the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.

“In the midst of the threats of war with Israel, the Islamic republic executed Arvin Ghahremani, an Iranian Jewish citizen,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, adding the legal case had “significant flaws”.

“However, in addition to this, Arvin was a Jew, and the institutionalised anti-Semitism in the Islamic republic undoubtedly played a crucial role in the execution of his sentence,” Amiry-Moghaddam added.

The once sizeable Jewish community in Shia-dominated Iran has dwindled since the 1979 Islamic Revolution but remains the largest in the Middle East outside Israel.

While Jewish Iranians were executed in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the execution of a Jewish Iranian is unprecedented in recent years. Ghahremani’s mother, Sonia Saadati, had asked for his life to be spared.

His family urged the victim’s relatives to accept blood money under Iran’s Islamic law of retribution (qisas), which permits this alternative.

The Mizan Online website of the Iranian judiciary confirmed Ghahremani’s execution, saying the victim’s family had “refused to give consent” to such a deal.

Iran and Israel have traded unprecedented air attacks this year following the outbreak of Israel’s offensives with armed groups backed by the Islamic republic in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.