Inside Iran’s execution machine: How regime puts prisoners to death on an ‘industrial

Iranian authorities are stepping up their brutal crackdown on the population with arrested protesters facing the death penalty for daring to rise up against the regime.

Merciless security guards have already slaughtered thousands of protesters in an increasingly bloody attempt to stamp out dissent with pictures showing victims lined up in body bags.

Desperate clerics led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who the UN previously accused of using the death penalty ‘at an industrial scale’, are now set to unleash a wave of executions after capturing huge numbers of activists.

Yesterday, it was reported that clothes shop owner Erfan Soltani was to become the first to face the death penalty having been arrested for taking part in anti-government protests last week.

Under the rule of Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the nation for the last 36 years, Iran has become infamous for being one of the most prolific executors in the world, behind only China. 

Just last month, the country was reported to have seen more than twice as many executions in 2025 than in 2024. 

The Norway-based Iran Human Rights group said it had verified at least 1,500 executions until the start of December, the BBC reported. 

Methods of execution range from being placed in front of firing squads to being thrown from great heights. But the most common method is hanging. 

Deeply conservative authorities utilise some of the most brutal techniques imaginable. 

In countries where hanging is still the preferred method of execution, such as Japan or Malaysia, gallows are constructed in such a way that those condemned to death have their necks snapped upon a drop, minimising suffering. 

But in Iran, gallows are about as simple as you can get. Those on death row are hoisted by their necks using mobile cranes.

Instead of an instant death, prisoners are strangled, restricting blood vessels going to their heads. 

As a result, it can take up to 20 minutes of abject torture for them to die, leaving victims writhing in agony before their last breaths.  

Crowds are sometimes encouraged to watch as the killings are carried out – with multiple executions often put on at once and the horrific scenes even televised.

When hangings are carried out with a step, relatives of victims killed by the condemned are given the right to kick the chair away from beneath the strung-up criminal.

According to the Iranian Penal Code, hanging can also be combined with other forms of punishment, such as flogging, amputation, or crucifixion. 

In August, horrifying videos and pictures showed the moment a convicted killer was publicly hanged from a crane in front of a cheering crowd. 

Sajad Molayi Hakani could be seen standing on a platform, blindfolded with a noose around his neck. 

The noose was attached to a crane being controlled by another man who appeared to be part of the execution team. 

The video shows dozens of people, including children, gathered around to watch the execution. 

As the man was hanged, the crowd could be seen clapping and cheering in delight. 

in 2007, extraordinary images circulated around the world showing a brave Iranian smiling with a noose around his neck moments before being hanged. 

The photograph of Majid Kavousifar, 28, captured the man’s final moments after he and his nephew Hossein were convicted of the murder of Judge Masoud Ahmadi Moghaddasi. They were both then publicly executed in central Tehran.

The men were hanged from ropes attached to five meter long cranes; however, both men were placed on stools, which were pulled from under their feet at the moment of their execution. 

The beaming man appeared to die instantly, while Hossein struggled for a few moments before going limp. After several minutes, their bodies were removed and placed into an ambulance.

Majid was seen in his final moments smiling at his nephew in an attempt to reassure him and his last words, to police officers, were: ‘I reached the point at which I decided to eradicate any injustice’.

He was seen in images waving in handcuffs at onlookers and grinning at the camera with the blue noose placed around his neck.

Hanging is not the only way the Islamic Republic conducts its numerous executions.

Stoning, one of the most barbaric and medieval practices, has been used to kill more than 150 people since 1980.

Despite several reports that Iran had effectively abolished the practice on several occasions in the 2000s and 2010s, numerous reports from opposition groups and independent media sources in Iran have claimed people are still stoned to death – and several prisoners remain on death row with a sentence of stoning.    

The savage practice sees the condemned buried in sand, usually up to the waist for men and up to the chest for women, before a crowd circles them and pelts them with rocks. 

The stones used are not typically heavy enough to kill the target with one blow, meaning the subject can be brutalised for hours before finally succumbing to their injuries.

In 2010, the then chief of Iran’s Human Rights Council defended stoning as a method of execution, arguing it could be seen as a ‘lesser punishment’.

This is because the sentence is considered completed when the condemned is pulled out of the earth, meaning that they could potentially free themselves if they can scrabble out of the sand before being killed.

But there are only a few recorded cases of such a feat being successfully achieved – and reports suggest that women who have miraculously managed to free themselves were forced back into the hole and killed anyway.

Stoning has long been prescribed for those convicted of adultery and some sexual offences, but disproportionately affects women.

Death by firing squad is exceedingly rare, with the last such execution taking place in 2008 to kill a man convicted of raping 17 children aged between seven and 11, per AsiaOne. 

Even rarer, but no less brutal, is the act of throwing people to their deaths as a form of capital punishment. 

In 2008, Pink News reported that six were sentenced by a judge in 2007 for abducting two other men in the Arsanjan, to the east of Shiraz, stealing their property and raping them. 

Two of the attackers were sentenced to being thrown to their deaths, while the four others were each given 100 lashes.

Iranian dissidents have also previously told the Daily Mail that the issue of executions in the country is one that deeply affects women in particular. 

Iran’s treatment of women has worsened dramatically in recent years, and the number of women executed in Iran has dramatically soared. 

The catalyst for this, dissidents say, is the increasing insecurity felt by the regime following mass protests against it in recent years – the most notable of which were the Mahsa Amini uprisings, which were ignited across the nation in 2022 following the unlawful death of a young woman who allegedly wore her hijab ‘improperly’. 

Since then, the number of women executed in Iran each year has more than doubled. 

In 2022, 15 women were executed. In the first nine months of 2025, 38 have been killed, according to the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI). Between July 30 and September 30, the regime executed 14 women – equivalent to one every four days.

The NCRI, which works in exile in France and Albania, says that women are largely executed for two reasons in Iran. 

The first is drug trafficking. Under a broken economic system, and often forced by their husbands, impoverished women unable to make a living any other way are made to carry drugs across the nation. 

Mafia-style networks that have alleged connections to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s military, use these women to traffic their drugs.

When they are inevitably caught, they are handed death sentences. 

The other is premeditated murder of a spouse. Under Iranian law, women are subject to their husbands’ wills and are unable to divorce them. 

As a result, the NCRI says, these women are forced to defend themselves in all too frequent instances of domestic violence.