Abolfazl Sedaghat, 20-year-old Dey uprising protester, sentenced to death in Mashhad

Abolfazl Sedaghat, a 20-year-old detained during the Dey 1404 uprising in Mashhad, has been sentenced to death on a charge of "moharebeh" (waging war against God). He is currently held in Mashhad's Vakilabad prison.

Sedaghat was tried in a joint case with Matin Farnian, 23, and Vahid Khedrikhah, 34. The death sentences of Farnian and Khedrikhah had already been reported, but the identity of the third defendant had not been known until now. The three were arrested on 19 and 20 January 2026, at the height of the protests in Mashhad. Khedrikhah had been wounded by the security forces' bullets during the protests.

A wave of death sentences at the Mashhad Revolutionary Court

Abolfazl Sedaghat's sentence is the latest in a chain of death sentences the Mashhad Revolutionary Court has handed down to Dey protesters. Branch 5 of this court, headed by Hossein Yazdankhah, has sentenced Ali Zaghi and Ilia Akbari in the Shandiz protest case, and Matin Shabani and Amir Delshad in other cases, to death. Pouria Hosseini-Mofrad, 23, was also sentenced to death in the same city in July–August this year, and his case is before the Supreme Court.

This year the Islamic Republic has executed at least five Dey protesters in Mashhad's Vakilabad prison: Mehdi Rasouli, Mohammadreza Miri and Ebrahim Dowlatabadi-Nejad on 3 May, and Ali Hemmati Sistani and Majid Nikandish on 30 September. In many of these cases, families have reported torture, forced confessions and denial of a lawyer of their choice.

More than 200 prisoners on death row

According to figures compiled by Iran International, about 220 prisoners across Iran are under sentence of death. Iran Human Rights has also reported at least 81 political executions from January to late October, 32 of them of protesters. In the past week alone, Mohammad Mahdi Parsa, a 21-year-old protester, was sentenced to death in Ahvaz, and details of the trial behind 10 death sentences in the Isfahan Shohada Square case showed that these sentences were based on confessions extracted under torture.

Abolfazl Sedaghat is 20 years old, and the Mashhad Revolutionary Court has sentenced him to death for the Dey protests.