Iran’s war‑time veil hides death‑row letters that reveal routine executions

In the spring of 2026, a collection of letters and home‑recorded videos smuggled out of the Rajai Shahr prison in Karaj began to circulate, offering the first public glimpse into the lives of Iranian inmates who had been sentenced to death and whose executions, concealed beneath the rhetoric of ongoing regional conflict, continue to proceed with a bureaucratic regularity that belies any claim of judicial transparency.

Among the voices, a former political detainee named Babak Alipour, who spent three years on death row before his own execution in March, used the cramped confines of his cell to draft a message to friends that not only commemorated the men already taken to the gallows but also introduced two particularly emblematic figures: the 69‑year‑old Behrouz Ehsani, described as the group’s “elder statesman” who maintained a stoic calm despite the looming certainty of death, and the 48‑year‑old father of three, Mehdi Hassani, whose intermittent appearances in the prison infirmary were marked by a repeated request that his children be reassured that he was “fine” even as his body deteriorated under inadequate medical care.

The very fact that such personal testimonies must be transmitted covertly, painstakingly written on scraps of paper and hidden within video recordings, underscores a systemic failure in which the Iranian penal apparatus provides neither official channels for the families of the condemned nor any mechanism for independent oversight, thereby allowing executions to be carried out as a low‑profile instrument of state power while the nation is preoccupied with external hostilities.

Consequently, the emergence of these documents not only humanizes the abstract statistics of capital punishment but also reveals a predictable contradiction in a system that simultaneously professes adherence to Islamic legal principles and yet routinely disregards due process, allowing elderly prisoners and young fathers alike to disappear behind the curtain of war without public accountability.

Published: April 25, 2026