Executed Iranian prisoners detail abuse, torture ahead of their killing to 'Post'
Yaghoub Karimpour, 43, and Nasser Bakerzadeh, 26, were hanged on Saturday, and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, 28, was executed on Sunday in Orumiyeh Central Prison.
Yaghoub Karimpour, 43, and Nasser Bakerzadeh, 26, were hanged on Saturday, and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, 28, was executed on Sunday in Orumiyeh Central Prison.
Prisoners Nasser Bakerzadeh, a Kurdish Sunni, and Yaghoub Karimpour, an Azerbaijani Turkic Yarsan citizen.(photo credit: Courtesy)ByDANIELLE GREYMAN-KENNARDMAY 6, 2026 21:23Updated: MAY 7, 2026 07:12
The Islamic regime tortured and mistreated prisoners ahead of their execution on Saturday, according to letters and recorded phone calls shared with The Jerusalem Post by the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) on Wednesday.
Yaghoub Karimpour, 43, and Nasser Bakerzadeh, 26, were hanged on Saturday, and Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, 28, was executed on Sunday in Orumiyeh Central Prison. All three men were able to speak with the KHRN before their executions.
None of the men’s loved ones were informed of the execution, despite Iranian law guaranteeing families a final visit, the organization noted, and the men had not known about their execution when KHRN Rebin Rahmani spoke with them the Saturday before they were killed.
The Islamic regime tortured Yaghoub Karimpour, a disabled Azerbaijani Turkic citizen accused of sharing intelligence with Mossad, before his execution, according to a letter penned by Karimpour in January and shared with the Post.
Mehrab Abdollahzadeh. (credit: Courtesy)
Iran’s judiciary sentenced Karimpour to death, alleging he passed sensitive information to a Mossad officer. Both the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights and KHRN state that he confessed to the charges after being subjected to physical and psychological pressure.
Iranian prisoners detail torture before execution
He eventually confessed after agents threatened to increase the torture against his wife; he wrote that he could hear her crying during his interrogation. “Many things were dictated to me, and I wrote untruths involuntarily and out of helplessness so that the torture and harassment of my wife would not continue,” he stated.
For two months after his arrest on June 16, 2025, he said he was held in a “dark detention center of the Intelligence Ministry,” before being transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison.
From his cell, Karimpour wrote to KHRN, sharing that he had been subjected to severe physical and psychological torture for approximately two months before eventually confessing to the crime of “Corruption on Earth” by Judge Sajjad Dousti.
A law graduate, Karimpour detailed how multiple rights were violated; failure to inform him of his right to a lawyer; preventing the presence of a lawyer (even a court-appointed one); blindfolded interrogations; death threats from the investigator; failure to provide evidence for the charges; the court’s disregard for claims of torture; holding the trial in absentia via video recording in under 15 minutes; and changing the indictment on the day of the trial to a capital offence.
In the letters, he denied ever possessing state secrets and claimed he was denied legal representation until his case was referred to Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Orumiyeh in mid-October, 2025. He appealed the sentence unsuccessfully in November.
“I have never held a position anywhere, nor have I frequented or entered government, military, or institutional centers. Naturally, I had no access to ordinary, confidential, or top-secret data, and I have not sent any information to any place or person; so how can they accuse me of espionage? [Ministry of] Intelligence agents want to blame their own faults and shortcomings on ordinary people; because if they were not at fault, so many commanders, scientists, and ordinary people would not have been killed in the 12-day war,” he wrote.
Karimpour shared that during his detention, he was denied access to medication he needed to manage his multiple physical disabilities, disabilities the regime was aware of as he received state funding prior to his detention. He stressed that the medication was denied as a means to pressure him into confessing. Karimpour’s health conditions were tied to a spinal surgery and a lung surgery he underwent, in addition to chronic mental health issues. He survived in prison with the support of his fellow prisoners, according to the KHRN.
“I suffer from a severe physical disability; my entire spine has been plated, I suffer from severe shortness of breath due to surgery on my right lung, my limbs, namely my arms and legs, are incapacitated, and I suffer from a severe neurological and mental illness, and I have fear, panic, and phobia of narrow, dark, and enclosed spaces. Also, due to my skeletal deformity, severe pressure is placed on my heart,” he detailed.
“Nervous attacks exacerbate my shortness of breath and increase my heart rate. I have medical records for each of my conditions and am under treatment. Despite my specific physical and mental status, I was treated like an ordinary person and subjected to various forms of torture, duress, and coercive suggestion to extract false statements dictated by the interrogator.”
Nasser Bakerzadeh was also accused of spying for Israel, though his death sentence for “spreading corruption on earth through intelligence cooperation or espionage in favor of the Zionist regime,” was twice overturned, according to an audio recording and documents he successfully sent to KHRN.
In a call with the KHRN, Bakerzadeh recounted how he was abducted by plain-clothed IRGC agents in 2023.
“About four or five months before I was actually arrested, in the summer of 2023, some men came to my shop in plain clothes. When I asked who they were, they didn't answer. They were armed and told me that if I didn't come with them, they would take me by force,” he said. “I was scared, so I closed up my shop and went with them. I got into a Persian car, and a motorcycle followed behind us. I didn't even consider for a second that they might be from the IRGC Intelligence Organization; I had no idea who they were.”
The men blindfolded him and transported him to a private room where they laughed at how terrified he became, thinking he had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. It was here they began questioning him about someone called ‘Hashem’ he worked with in the tourism industry.
“Since I hadn't done anything wrong, I spoke freely. I told them everything: in the winter of 2020, Hashem had messaged me saying he worked for a tourism company and wanted to collaborate on tourism projects. I agreed, and we ended up working together on several tourism-related jobs. That's all it was, tourism. We never even took a photo near a military site. We were doing tourism research,” he swore, adding that he had even got permission from the IRGC before taking the photos of tourism sites.
The court ruling noted that “from the outset of the case, the defendant stated that when an individual described as a Mossad officer was in contact with him, he refrained from providing any information about military installations and, from the very beginning, reported the matter to the relevant authorities by calling police lines 113 or 110, but those authorities took no action. He also stated that once he realized the foreign individual was requesting information beyond tourism matters, he severed contact with that person.”
The Supreme Court further stated that the prosecution had failed to prove the suspected Mossad agent was in fact connected to Israel.
He said that the IRGC had even failed to provide evidence to suggest that Hashem had connections with Israel, to the confusion of the Supreme Court, which is why his sentence had originally been reduced to 10 years.
“When I was first arrested, the charge was ‘acting against national security,’ and there was no mention of Israel at all. Within two or three hours, that changed to "espionage for Israel." They took the opportunity and completely reframed the charges against me,” Bakerzadeh claimed.
Fearing being sent to prison, Bakerzadeh agreed to help the IRGC locate Hashem, but they continued to harass him, showing up to his store and taking phones belonging to his customers. This behavior made him doubtful that the abductors were truly agents of the IRGC, and so he traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan for 20 days to reflect on the situation.
“Every day I would call the man and say, ‘If you're really from the IRGC Intelligence Organization, come meet me and bring my phones back.’ My plan wasn't to flee. I went to Bashur only to figure out who these people actually were,” he told the KHRN. “If they were from the IRGC Intelligence Organization, I would go back and answer their questions. I hadn't done anything wrong. And if they weren't, and they turned out to be just robbers, I would report them to the security forces.”
Returning to Iran less than three weeks after he left, Bakerzadeh and his father began demanding the agent return the stolen phones, and went to file a complaint with the IRGC after they were flooded with excuses on why he couldn’t meet with them. After filing a complaint to the IRGC, the agent responded by seeking a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of being a spy.
After his arrest on January 2, 2024, he recounted how he was held in solitary confinement in an IRGC Intelligence unit for three months, during which he “was subjected to the most severe psychological torture.”
“They left me alone in that cell for twenty days at a time. I had lost my mind,” he said before ending the call.
Unlike Karimpour and Bakerzadeh, Mehrab Abdollahzadeh was not accused of spying for Israel. The regime executed him for his alleged role in the killing of security officer Abbas Fatemiyeh during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, a charge he denied during calls with the KHRN.
“I am completely innocent, but they want to make me a scapegoat,” he swore.
Abdollahzadeh said a month after the protests broke out in response to the regime’s murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, IRGC agents showed up at his store and demanded he spy on his community on their behalf.
After he refused the IRGC’s demands, using the reasoning that he had no prominent role in the community, he said the agents began torturing him.
“They then subjected me to both physical and psychological torture. They tied me to a chair and beat me for a week. When they realized I was innocent and couldn't give them what they wanted, they switched to psychological torture. It got so bad that I started hitting my head against the wall, splitting it open in 20 to 30 places. I had lost my mind. They also gave me hallucinogenic substances to try to make me work for them,” he told the KHRN. “After 30 to 40 days, they interrogated me again and showed me a video of a Basij member being killed. They told me they knew I wasn't in the video and that I hadn't done it.”
He claimed that the IRGC promised to release him if he gave information on the attacks against Basij members, information that he didn’t have. After the IRGC agents abducted his girlfriend and began threatening to take his family, he said he agreed to sign a confession saying he had assaulted members of the security forces.
He recounted how the regime left him in a room of about two to three square metres for 15 days after signing the confession and how he was only moved after a doctor visited him and confirmed he had “lost his mind.” From there, he said he spent another 20 days in solitary confinement before finally being sent to a normal prison cell.
“Once I was in prison, news about my situation started to appear in the media. But my family asked the media to stop, because they didn't know any better; they believed the legal process would take care of things,” he recounted. “They thought the state wouldn't convict someone for no reason. We believed that confessions made under torture would not be accepted in court and that a judge wouldn't hand down a sentence without proper grounds. So, we hired a lawyer, and my trial took place seven to eight months later.”
Tried across three sessions and allowed to speak for less than five minutes total, he was sentenced to death on September 19, 2024. His lawyers appealed the sentence once he was informed in October, but on 18 December 2025, the sentence execution judge informed him that Branch Nine of the Supreme Court had upheld his death sentence. In mid-February 2026, the Supreme Court also rejected his application for a retrial.
Abdollahzadeh said the IRGC had threatened those aware of his innocence into staying quiet and that even the family of the killed Basij member did not believe he was guilty.
“Every judge tells me to get the plaintiff's consent. But the IRGC will not allow it. They openly want to make me the scapegoat,” he said. “They openly threaten my family. We have hired two lawyers, both of whom have written defenses and traveled to Tehran, but no one is willing to listen, and no one is hearing our voice. All they want is to make me the scapegoat.”
Abdollahzadeh was reluctant to speak with the KHRN, concluding his call by swearing his innocence and saying it was his “last resort” to “go public” with what had happened.
All the men’s families were denied a final visit and are still being denied access to the bodies when they approached authorities at Orumiyeh Central Prison, and have been banned from having any religious ceremonies to memorialize them.
KHRN’s Rahmani, visibly depressed by the news of the execution, told the Post that the regime had begun executing prisoners involved in any security case as an “act of revenge” against Israel and the United States.
“The regime wants to spread fear and intimidation among people, so telling the people,” he said, adding that such actions were to scare Iranians away from protesting the regime or connecting with Israel.
