Journalist, activist put to death in Iran
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran on Saturday executed an exiled journalist over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017, a little more than a year after authorities tricked him into traveling to Iraq where he was abducted.
Ruhollah Zam, 47, was one of several opposition figures seized by Iranian intelligence operatives abroad in recent months as Tehran struggles under the weight of U.S. sanctions.
Kidnapping and executing Zam, who lived in Paris under what Iran described as French government protection, is likely to further chill the scattered Iranian opposition across the West.
The execution drew immediate international condemnation.
“This is a barbarous and unacceptable act,” the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement, which also condemned the execution as a “grave blow” to freedom of expression and media freedom in Iran.
The German Foreign Ministry expressed shock about the circumstances of Zam’s conviction and what it described as his “abduction from abroad.”
Diana Eltahawy of Amnesty International said Zam’s “execution is a deadly blow to freedom of expression in Iran and shows the extent of the Iranian authorities’ brutal tactics to instill fear and deter dissent.”
Iranian state television referred to Zam as “the leader of the riots” in announcing his execution by hanging early Saturday. In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of “corruption on Earth,” a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran’s government.
Zam’s website AmadNews and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the 2017 protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran’s Shiite theocracy.
Those demonstrations, which began in December 2017 and continued into 2018, represented the biggest challenge to Iran’s rulers since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar unrest in November last year.
The initial spark for the 2017 protests was a sudden jump in food prices. Many believe that hard-line opponents of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani instigated the first demonstrations in the conservative city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, trying to direct public anger at the president. But as protests spread from town to town, the backlash turned against the entire ruling class.
Soon, cries directly challenging Rouhani and even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be heard in online videos shared by Zam.
Telegram shut down the channel over Iranian government complaints that it spread information about how to make gasoline bombs. The channel later continued under a different name. Zam denied inciting violence on Telegram at the time.
The 2017 protests reportedly saw some 5,000 people detained and 25 killed.
Zam himself had fled Iran after the 2009 protests, heading first to Malaysia and then to France. While Iranian authorities have never described how Iran’s Revolutionary Guard detained him, Amnesty said he was seized on a trip to neighboring Iraq — where the Guard has wielded deep influence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Zam’s father, the reformist Shiite cleric Mohammad Ali Zam, seemed to confirm the Iraqi abduction in comments on Instagram on Saturday.
“I made a deal with God, I have no worries, these people brought me to Karbala, but did not allow me to visit the shrine,” the Instagram post quotes the younger Zam as saying. Karbala is home to the shrine of Imam Hussein, an important pilgrimage point for Shiites.
The post added: “I told him, ‘Don’t worry, Imam Hussein is in all visitors’ hearts, he is with you.’”
The cleric said he was allowed to visit Tehran’s Evin prison Friday to see his son only after agreeing not to tell him his execution loomed.