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VOA – An Iranian wrestler sentenced to death for allegedly killing a security guard during an antigovernment protest in 2018 has had his sentence upheld by Iran’s top court — despite retracting a confession he said was made under torture, according to a knowledgeable source.
In a Monday interview with VOA Persian, the source, who is close to the family of Navid Afkari Sangari, said the Iranian Supreme Court upheld Afkari’s death sentence in an August 15 ruling, bringing him a step closer to potential execution. The Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency confirmed the Supreme Court’s decision in a Monday tweet without specifying the ruling’s date.
Afkari is a 27-year-old Iranian freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestler from the south-central city of Shiraz who has won medals in domestic and international competitions.
A criminal court in Fars province, of which Shiraz is the capital, had handed Afkari the death penalty for murder in the killing of a local security guard of a government water facility on August 2, 2018. The killing of Hassan Torkaman happened on the sidelines of antigovernment protests in Shiraz and other cities against Iran’s worsening economic conditions, including a sharp loss in the value of the national currency.
Authorities in Shiraz had arrested Afkari and his brother, Vahid, in connection with the killing on September 17, 2018, and detained a third brother, Habib, later that year. All three have remained in detention and separated from each other in Shiraz’s Adel Abad prison.
The Fars criminal court that sentenced Navid to death also handed Vahid a 27-year prison term for allegedly being an accessory to murder.
All three brothers also have been convicted by a separate Revolutionary Court in Shiraz of multiple national security offenses for alleged involvement in the killing of Torkaman and the antigovernment protests that coincided with it. That court imposed a second death sentence on Navid for “moharebeh” or “enmity against God” and 27-year prison terms on Vahid and Habib for allegedly colluding with him.
The Revolutionary Court sentences for the three brothers remain in an appeal process.
The Supreme Court’s upholding of the criminal court’s death sentence against Navid places his fate in the hands of Iranian judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi. Navid’s lawyer, Hassan Younesi, can ask Raisi to consider suspending the death sentence under Article 477 of Iran’s Code of Criminal Procedure, under which Raisi can order the Supreme Court to overturn a verdict that he deems to be “in contravention of Sharia [Islamic law]” and issue a new one.
It is not clear if Younesi has asked or will ask Raisi to consider overturning the death sentence. There is no time limit for such a request and there has been no word on what Raisi will do.
The source who spoke to VOA said the three brothers’ convictions primarily were based on confessions extracted under torture during interrogations. The source said both Navid and Vahid told court officials they had been tortured into confessing, but their statements were ignored.
In a video message recorded by the Afkari brothers’ mother, Behieh Namjoo, and posted to social media on August 30, she lamented what she said was the torture of her three sons. She said Vahid had attempted suicide twice in response to pressure to incriminate his two brothers.
Navid and Vahid shared their own accounts of being tortured in audio messages recorded in prison and posted to Twitter by Iranian rights activist Alireza Roshan on August 30 and 31.
In Navid’s recording, he said a Shiraz medical examiner had looked at injuries that he sustained in prison including a broken right hand and concluded that they were caused by torture.
Vahid said interrogators had placed a plastic bag over his head, beat him with chains for hours and struck the bottom of his feet with a club.
In addition to forced confessions, VOA’s source said the lack of proper legal representation for the Afkari brothers also made their verdicts unfair. The source said Iranian authorities have denied Navid and Vahid the lawyers of their choice, forcing them to be represented by a government appointee, while Habib has had no lawyer to represent him.
While Younesi, the government-appointed lawyer, was not whom the Afkari brothers originally wanted to represent them, he has publicly rejected one of the prosecution’s main pieces of evidence beyond the retracted confessions.
In a Monday tweet, Younesi said the evidence that had been presented at trial, namely security camera footage of the street where Torkaman had been killed, had been recorded an hour before the time of the incident rather than during or after it.
“There is not one shred of evidence in this damned case that shows I’m guilty,” Navid said in his audio recording. “But they don’t want to listen to us. I realized they are looking for a neck for their rope,” he added.
The source said the Afkari family has lost hope that the Iranian judiciary will act to absolve the three brothers of wrongdoing. “They are asking for help from the international community to prove their innocence,” the source said.
Many Iranian social media users have responded to the brothers’ plight in recent days by tweeting messages of opposition to the harsh sentences imposed on them.
This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. Click here for the original Persian version of the story.
