Last week, it was announced that the case of several people who were arrested during the Iranian People’s uprising has been referred to Judge Salvati, known as the Judge of Death. Subsequently, it was announced that he trialed some of these detainees on the charge of ‘moharebeh’ (waging war against God), which may lead to the issuance of a death sentence for them.
Like the regime’s current president Ebrahim Raisi, infamous for his judgments as a prosecutor in the 1988 massacre in which the regime killed more than 30,000 political prisoners, Salavati is one of the regime’s main figures who regularly issue death sentences and, like all the regime’s officials, this man is living a dismal life, full of crime and killings.
There is little to no information about his past other than that he is known as Abolqasem Salavati. Salvati has two children, a daughter, and a son. His daughter lives outside of Iran, and for this reason, he has taken many trips abroad to England and France. Currently, he lives in Tehran on Shariati Street.
He is always accompanied by seven bodyguards and is known to carry two guns himself. Salavati owns several plots of land in Kermanshah and 2 houses for his children in this city.
From what is known about Salavati, he served in the Basij between 1980 and 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war where he was injured. In 1986, he joined the judicial police of Kurdistan province before becoming a prosecutor and judge in the city of Sanandaj in 1991, even though there is no proof of his education, let alone evidence of a law degree.
Salavati first served as a judge in Islamabad West. He then went to Kermanshah and lived for a while in the confiscated house of general Hossein Hamedanian, before being transferred to Hamedan after a promotion for his blatant executions in West Islamabad.
His wife is Parvin Shiri from Kermanshah who has been a patient in a mental hospital for the past 9 years. At the age of 40, she retired from the university she worked at due to mental illness. The cause of Parvin Shiri’s illness has been attributed to the psychological stress of the announcement of the executions by her husband.
Part of the verdicts issued by Salavati:
- Ruhollah Zam was sentenced to death with 17 charges.
- In the case of Environmental Activists, the defendants were not allowed to appoint a lawyer.
- Narges Mohammadi was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2014. She was released after about eight years.
- Mohsen Amir Aslani was sentenced by Salavati and executed on 24 September 2014 in the Rajaei Shahr prison of Karaj on the charge of different interpretations of the Quran.
- Zahra Bahrami, an Iranian-Dutch citizen who was arrested in the Ashura protests of 2008, was a citizen of the Netherlands so the death sentence for the crime of participating in demonstrations would have had political consequences, so Salavati accused her of drug trafficking and sentenced her to be executed on 22 January 2011.
- Salavati judged and issued a ten-year prison sentence for Omid Kokabi in May 2013 on the charge of cooperating with a hostile country. Kokabi was an elite student of atomic physics in America and ranked 29th in Iran’s national entrance exam. However, it was reported that the main reason for his verdict was that Kokabi had not agreed to cooperate with the regime’s military universities.
The death sentences and imprisonments issued by Salavati in 2008 are as follows:
- Mohammadreza Alizamani (execution)
- Arash Rahmanipour (execution)
- Abdol Reza Ghanbari (execution)
- Amirreza Arefi, Majid Tavakoli (8 and a half years imprisonment)
- Rasool Badaghi (6 years imprisonment),
- Qasim Sholeh Saadi (3 years imprisonment)
