Iran Focus
Four of the people, including the woman, were hanged on Wednesday, the official state daily Iran wrote. Another state daily Vatan Emrooz identified the men as Hamid Mohammadi, Safarali Nassiri, and Hosseinali Robatseyli and the woman as Zeynab Nazarzadeh. It said they were hanged in Tehran's Evin Prison.
All four were accused of murder.
Five other people were hanged in a prison in Kerman, south-east Iran, according to the Fars news agency, which is operated by the Office of Iran's Supreme Leader. It did not give their full names and it was not clear when they were hanged.
The report described the five as drug traffickers.
Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug trafficking.
Evin Prison was built by the Shah’s regime as a modern security prison to house political dissidents, but it became the Islamic Republic’s most dreaded gulag and the site of thousands of political executions. Ward 209 is exclusively set aside for political prisoners.
Iran has stepped up the number of mass executions carried out in recent months. At least 59 people were executed in Iran in January.
Authorities hanged eight men on Saturday in a prison in the town of Taybad, north-east Iran, the state-run daily Aftab-e Yazd wrote on Wednesday. They were accused of drug trafficking.
The hard-line semi-official daily Jomhuri Eslami wrote on Wednesday that another man, identified as Abdolbaret Noorzehi, was hanged in a prison in the town of Khash, south-east Iran. It said he was accused of murder but did not say when he was hanged.
Iran's judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi confirmed on 5 May that a man had been stoned to death for adultery one month earlier in the northern city of Rasht. In January he confirmed that two men had been stoned to death for adultery last December in Mashhad while a third man managed to struggle out of the hole he had been buried in.
Delara Darabi, 23, a talented Iranian artist who was accused of a committing a crime when she was 17 and whose sentencing had been condemned by international human rights organisations, was hanged on 1 May in Rasht. She denied carrying out the murder of which she was accused.
Her lawyer said she was hanged in prison before he arrived at the scene.
The human rights group Amnesty International says that Iranian authorities executed at least eight juvenile offenders in 2008 "in flagrant violation of international law", adding that Iran was the only country in the world in which juvenile offenders were known to have been executed in 2008.
The group says more than 130 child offenders are currently on death row in Iran.
Under Iranian law, girls above the age of nine and boys above the age of fifteen are considered as adults and could be executed for capital offences.
Under increasing international pressure, the Iranian regime keeps children on death row in Juvenile Prison until they turn 18.
