IRAN - Mozhdeh Hashemi Bazargani’s death sentence upheld

September 26, 2026 - IRAN. Mozhdeh Hashemi Bazargani’s death sentence upheld

Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of Mozhdeh Hashemi Bazargani, a 27-year-old Red Crescent worker who said in a recording from Qazvin prison that interrogators beat her until her teeth broke and made her sign a confession, a source told Iran International.

Hashemi Bazargani was denied a lawyer of her own choosing throughout the proceedings, the source said. She is held in Qazvin Central Prison, in the city 150 kilometers west of Tehran, and is accused of sending the location of a military site to “the enemy,” a charge she has denied.

In an audio message from prison earlier this year, she said security agents raided her home at 2:30 in the morning on April 4, cutting through the door with a metal grinder. She had been living with her elderly, ailing mother.

After her arrest, she said, she was beaten with a pipe and a baton on the head, neck and shoulders during long interrogations, breaking two teeth and leaving her with dizziness, shortness of breath and heart problems. No doctor came to examine her despite visible bruising and injuries, and her requests to be taken to the coroner’s office to document the beating went unanswered.

Interrogators pressed her to confess, she said. “They pin a thousand charges on me. They force me: whatever we tell you, you have to write it down and sign it.”

She said they beat her while she was blindfolded and cut her interrogation answers into a video presenting her as a terrorist. The charges put to her included espionage and receiving money from abroad. The confession footage was broadcast on Qazvin’s provincial state television channel.

She also rejected the accusation of taking any money.

Her physical and mental condition is poor, the source told Iran International. Under the pressure of detention she has suffered seizures and lost consciousness several times, and was hospitalized before being returned to prison after a partial recovery.

In her message she also spoke of her mother in the town of Alvand, near Qazvin, who she said had been left with no one to care for her.

Iran’s judiciary has issued sentences ranging from long prison terms to death against dozens of people this year on charges of espionage, sending information abroad or contact with hostile states, many of them arrested after the January protests.

Confessions broadcast on state television have repeatedly been described by defendants and their families as obtained under torture, and Revolutionary Court trials in such cases are closed to public scrutiny of the evidence.