State-run media in Iran reported on Wednesday, August 6, that two political prisoners had been executed:
Mehdi Asgharzadeh, on the charge of “membership in the terrorist group ISIS,” and Roozbeh Vadi, on the charge of “espionage for Israel.”

Mehdi Asgharzadeh, a 35-year-old prisoner from Javanrud, was executed in Ghezel Hesar Prison after serving 10 years in prison. He had been transferred there from Dizelabad Prison in Kermanshah. Reports indicate that he was arrested in 2016 upon returning from Syria, and after two years in solitary confinement, was sentenced to eight years in prison. In autumn 2023, Branch 2 of the Kermanshah Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Shahrokh Moradi, sentenced him to death for “armed uprising against the Islamic Republic” and to three years in prison for “membership in ISIS.”
Human rights sources state that Asgharzadeh was tortured during interrogation and forced to make coerced confessions. His body will not be returned to his family.

In a separate case, Roozbeh Vadi, a PhD graduate in nuclear engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology and a member of the Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute affiliated with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was executed on charges of “espionage for Israel.”
The judiciary claims he provided information about one of the assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists to Mossad and met with officers from the agency during a trip to Vienna.

The Amirkabir Newsletter criticized the ruling, writing that the case fabricated against Dr. Vadi shows that even the highest levels of expertise and service in the Islamic Republic provide no guarantee of personal or professional security for the country’s elites, and that amid the growing restrictions on scientific work, migration has become a necessity.