Amirsalar Davoudi: Isfahan judiciary cites Sepahi wedding audio among arrest reasons

Asadollah Jafari, head of the Isfahan provincial judiciary, announced that the publication of the audio file of the wedding ceremony of Alireza Sepahi and Mahshad Keshani was one of the reasons for the arrest of Amirsalar Davoudi, a lawyer and defender of political prisoners. This is the first time an Islamic Republic judicial official has openly linked the lawyer's arrest to a ceremony held a few hours before Alireza Sepahi's execution.

Amirsalar Davoudi was arrested on Sunday, 11 October 2026, at about 10:30 a.m., while attending a session of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court to defend his client Mahshad Keshani. The Dadban Legal Advice Centre said plainclothes agents took him to an unknown location; Iran International also reported that two agents took him to the office of the head of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court complex, and that for hours afterwards there was no news of his condition.

A wedding before an execution

Mahshad Keshani, a political prisoner sentenced to five years in prison, is the wife of Alireza Sepahi, a young man who was among those detained in the uprising of December 2025–January 2026 and was executed in the early hours of 5 October. The two were engaged before Keshani's arrest. Amirsalar Davoudi held their wedding ceremony by audio call between two prisons in Isfahan, with the two prisoners' fathers present, and published the audio of the ceremony on his Instagram page. After Sepahi's execution he also called the sentence unjust.

In effect, the Islamic Republic's judiciary has thus pursued a lawyer for documenting the last hours of the life of an executed protester. The same judicial official had earlier announced the start of identifying and taking judicial action against unveiled women in Isfahan.

Prosecution of independent lawyers

Dadban described the prosecution of lawyers defending political and security defendants as an ongoing practice in the Islamic Republic's judiciary and warned that action against independent lawyers restricts citizens' access to effective defence and a fair trial.

Amirsalar Davoudi had also been arrested earlier, in October–November 2018, and sentenced to 30 years in prison and 111 lashes; the case was also mentioned in the US State Department's human rights report. The new wave of executions in Iran, which according to HRANA has reached more than 2,000 people in one year, is now accompanied by pressure on the lawyers who defend the condemned.

An Isfahan judicial official cited the publication of the audio of the wedding of Alireza Sepahi, an executed protester, as one of the reasons for the arrest of his lawyer.