According to the judiciary, Iranian officials hanged five people on Monday for “armed drug smuggling” in the south of the country.
According to Mojtaba Ghahramani, Chief Justice of the southern province of Hormozgan, the convicts had been found to be “all criminals and armed drug smugglers” and had received hanging sentences in a judgment upheld by Iran’s top court.
“The sentences of the aforementioned were carried out this morning in Bandar Abbas and Minab prisons” in Hormozgan, he added.
With the most recent hangings, there have been eight people executed for drug smuggling in less than a week.
Following concerns from the UN regarding the “frighteningly” high number of executions in the nation, the judiciary executed three drug cartel defendants on Wednesday.
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International claim that Iran executes more people each year than any other country outside China.
Following an unusual conviction for profaning the Koran and insulting the Prophet Muhammad, Iran killed two people on Monday. This drew censure from the US and a human rights group outrage.
On Tuesday, UN rights chief Volker Turk sounded the alarm over Iran’s “abominable” track record this year, with an average of more than 10 people being put to death each week.
Iran has already carried out more than 210 executions this year, the most of them for drug-related offenses, but according to a statement from the UN, the actual figure is probably significantly higher.
According to a report released in April by the organizations Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) and Iran Human Rights (IHR), both located in Paris and Norway, the regime executed 75% more people in 2022 than the year before.
According to the two rights organizations, at least 582 individuals were put to death in Iran last year, which is a significant increase from the 333 reported in 2021 and the biggest number of executions since 2015.