Ali Zakani, a 19-year-old from Mahmudabad in Qazvin province who was arrested the day after the protests of 8 January 2026, has been sentenced to death according to human rights sources and is at risk of having the sentence carried out. Voice of America, citing reports by the Center for Human Rights in Iran, wrote on Saturday, 10 October 2026, that a forced confession was extracted from the young man under torture.
According to the report, on 9 January, after the security agencies summoned him, Ali Zakani appeared at the place they had designated and was arrested. He is being held in Chubindar prison in Qazvin. According to human rights sources, he was beaten so badly during interrogation that two of his ribs and four of his teeth were broken. The charge the Revolutionary Court has brought against him is "moharebeh" (waging war against God), which, according to the same sources, is based on breaking the window of a bank, destroying an ATM and damaging public property.
Visiting rights cut off after the sentence
According to Voice of America, Ali Zakani was allowed to meet his family until the sentence was issued, but this right was taken away from him after the death sentence was communicated. The name of the judge in the case and the date the sentence was issued have not yet been published.
In a statement published in domestic media on Saturday, 10 October, the Islamic Republic's judiciary called reports of this prisoner's torture "pure lies" and claimed that "no final sentence has so far" been issued for him. The statement did not deny that a first-instance death sentence had been issued and spoke only of its not being final. In the same statement the judiciary described the young man as one of the figures of what it calls the "January coup", a label the government uses for the nationwide January uprising.
According to human rights sources, Ali Zakani lost two ribs and four teeth during interrogation, and his death sentence was issued on the basis of a forced confession.
Executions of protesters from the January uprising
Ali Zakani's case comes to light at a time when the Islamic Republic has in recent months executed a number of those arrested in the January uprising, among them Alireza Sepahi and Alireza Raisi, two defendants in the Alikhani Square case in Isfahan, who were executed in the early hours of Monday, 5 October, in Dastgerd prison in Isfahan. In the same report Voice of America carried another account, citing human rights sources, according to which interrogators in Isfahan abused an 18-year-old's mother in front of him to extract a confession.
Earlier, the Revolutionary Court in Bojnurd sentenced Hadi Abbasian, a protester from Shirvan, to death over protest videos. On Friday, 9 October, HRANA reported in its annual report at least 2,003 executions in Iran in one year.
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