TEHRAN: Iran has executed Ruhollah Zam, dissident journalist and a former opposition figure who had lived in exile in France and was implicated in anti-government protests, days after his sentence was upheld.
According to Iranian media, the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Zam was hanged in the morning after the supreme court upheld his sentence due to ‘the severity of the crimes’ committed against the Islamic republic.
France and human rights groups had condemned the Supreme Court’s decision. Press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned the execution.
London-based human rights group Amnesty International, in a statement after his verdict was confirmed, described Zam as a ‘journalist and dissident’. It said the confirmation marked a shocking escalation in the use of the death penalty as a weapon of repression.
In October 2019, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had trapped Zam in a ‘complex operation using intelligence deception.’ It did not say where the operation took place.
The official IRNA news agency said he was also convicted of espionage for France and an unnamed country in the region, cooperating with the “hostile government of America”, acting against “the country’s security”, insulting the “sanctity of Islam” and instigating violence during the 2017 protests.
As his trial started, state television broadcast a documentary’ about Zam’s “relations” with the Islamic republic’s foes. Amnesty has repeatedly called on Iran to stop broadcasting videos of ‘confessions’ by suspects, saying they ‘violate the defendants’ rights’.
Zam is one of several people to have been sentenced to death over participation or links to protests that rocked Iran between 2017 and 2019. Navid Afkari, a 27-year-old wrestler, was executed at a prison in the southern city of Shiraz in September.
