IranWire

Iranian authorities executed Edris Jamshidzehi on Thursday morning in southeastern Zahedan.

Jamshidzehi had been sentenced to death for the alleged killing of a Basij militia agent.

The execution comes seven years after Jamshidzehi's arrest in 2017 on charges of killing Seyed Abdolkarim Sajjadi, a Basij agent, in Iranshahr, located in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan.

Following his arrest, Jamshidzehi was tried and sentenced to death by the Zahedan Criminal Court.

Jamshidzehi, around 45 years old at the time of his execution, was a father of five children and resided in Tigh Ap village in the Iranshahr area.

Sources report that he was granted a final meeting with his family on Wednesday, just hours before his execution.

The Basij, a paramilitary volunteer militia, operates as a subsidiary of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and has been implicated in the suppression of dissent within the country.

According to a report by Amnesty International, Iran has reached its highest level of death sentence execution in the last eight years, with the judiciary of the Islamic Republic executing 853 people in 2023 alone.

The report indicates that 481 executions, more than half of the total, were related to drug crimes.

This marks an 89 per cent rise in death penalties for drug-related offenses compared to 2022 when 255 people were executed.

The latest numbers also show a staggering 264 per cent increase compared to 2021, when 132 individuals faced execution on similar charges.