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Iran has executed a journalist for his role in inspiring nationwide economic protests in 2017, a year after the exile was captured by the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iranian state television and the state news agency IRNA said Ruhollah Zam, 47, was hanged early Saturday morning. The reports did not elaborate.
In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of “corruption on Earth,” a charge often used in espionage cases or attempts to overthrow the Iranian government.
Zam’s website, AmadNews, and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram, had spread the times of the protests and embarrassing information about officials directly challenging Iran’s Shiite theocracy.
Those demonstrations, which began in late 2017, posed the biggest challenge to Iran since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar mass unrest in November 2019.
The initial spark of the 2017 protests was a sudden spike in food prices. Many believe that hardline opponents of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani instigated the first demonstrations in the conservative city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, trying to direct public anger towards the president.
But as the protests spread from town to town, the backlash turned against the entire ruling class.
Soon, the screams directly challenging Rouhani and even the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could be heard on online videos shared by Zam. His channel also shared schedules and organizational details of the protests.
Telegram shut down the channel due to complaints from the Iranian government that it released information on how to make gasoline pumps. The channel later continued under a different name.
Zam, who said he fled Iran after being falsely accused of working with foreign intelligence services, denied inciting violence on Telegram at the time. The 2017 protests reportedly saw some 5,000 people arrested and 25 killed.
In October 2019, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had caught Zam, who had been given asylum in France and was based in Paris, in a “complex operation using intelligence deception.” He did not say where the operation took place.
Zam was one of several opposition figures in exile who were returned to Iran in the past year.
France had criticized his death sentence as “a severe blow to freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Iran.”
Zam appeared in a series of televised confessions earlier this year, in which he apologized for his past activities.
During an interview in July, he said that he had lost about 30 kilograms since his arrest.
Zam is the son of a reformist Shiite cleric who once held a government policy position in the early 1980s. Mohammad Ali Zam wrote a letter published by Iranian media in July 2017 in which he said he would not support his son for the AmadNews reports and the messages on his Telegram channel.
