Hadhwanaag
Iran hanged 11 members of the Baluch minority on drug
charges within 48 hours, a nongovernmental organization said Wednesday, raising
alarm that the community is disproportionately targeted in a surge of
executions.
Nine Iranian Baluchis and two Baluchi citizens of
neighboring Afghanistan were hanged from early Sunday to early Tuesday,
Norway-based Iran Human Rights said.
The group added that it recorded a total of 61
executions across Iran in July as Iran presses ahead with a surge in capital
punishment that has now seen the country put 423 people to death so far this
year.
Activists accuse Iran of using capital punishment to
spread fear throughout the population in the wake of the protest movement that
erupted last September over the death of Mahsa Amini, 22. The Iranian Kurdish
woman had been detained for allegedly flouting the Islamic republic's strict
dress rules for women.
IHR said that while members of the Baluch minority —
who adhere to the Sunni strain of Islam and not the Shiite branch predominant
in Iran — make up 2% to 6% of the population, they accounted for a third of all
executions in 2022.
Eight Baluch men were executed on drug charges in the
main prison of Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan province, from July
30 to August 1, it said.
Another Baluch man was executed on similar charges
July 31 at a prison in Birjand city in the eastern province of Khorasan, it
added.
Mohammad Arbab, 30, and Asadollah Amini, 32, two
Afghan nationals of Baluch ethnicity, were secretly executed in Zabol Prison in
Sistan-Baluchistan on July 30 and 31, it said.
The number of executions in Iran on drug-related
charges dropped dramatically in 2018 following amendments to the anti-narcotics
law but has surged again since 2021.
IHR said almost half of the 256 people executed on
drug-related charges in 2022 were members of the Baluch community.
After Amini's death in Tehran, protests also took
place in Zahedan, fueled by long-held anger over discrimination of the Baluch
minority and initially sparked by the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a
police officer in the region.
Rights groups say the demonstrations were targets of
deadly crackdowns by the security forces in Iran's poorest region.
VOA
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