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Iran broadcast on television Saturday night the confession of an Iranian fighter facing the death penalty after the US president called for the young man’s life to be spared.
The images resemble “hundreds of other alleged forced confessions” broadcast on Iranian state television “in the last decade,” according to the US Associated Press.
Navid Afkari, 27, portrayed as a young combatant, was found guilty of the “voluntary murder” of an employee of the public water company in Shiraz, in the south, stabbed on 2 August 2018.
The case is the subject of a campaign on social media, portraying Navid and his brothers Vahid and Habib, sentenced to 54 and 27 years in prison respectively, as targeted victims for their participation in protests against the Iranian government.
“I have heard that Iran is preparing to execute a major star of the struggle, Navid Afkari, 27, who only participated in an anti-government rally,” President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday.
“To the attention of Iranian leaders. I would really appreciate it if you would spare this young man’s life and not execute him. Thank you! “Said.
That same day, the semi-official Tasnim news agency rejected the message from the president of the United States.
“Trump is concerned about the life of a murderer while putting the lives of many Iranian patients at risk by imposing severe sanctions,” which also affect hospitals, he said.
Washington reinstated tough economic sanctions against Iran after abandoning Tehran’s nuclear deal with major powers in 2015 in mid-2018.
Images aired on state television on Saturday show the deadly victim’s tearful parents and Navid Afkari sitting on a motorcycle saying he stabbed Hassam Torkaman in the back, without explaining why he had committed the attack.
A recent United Nations report mentions “a widespread pattern of officials using torture to extract false confessions” from protesters against the Government of the Islamic Republic.
The speed with which Iran broadcast Afkari’s confession on television may indicate that it intends to execute him, according to the AP, which added that Trump wrote on Twitter earlier this year about three other men who should be executed and then received a new process.
With at least 251 executions in 2019, Iran is, after China, the country that uses the death penalty the most, according to the latest world report on the death penalty published by Amnesty International.
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