The death sentence for Mohammad-Mehdi Soleimani, one of those arrested during the nationwide protests of 2022, has been issued amid extensive ambiguities in his case, heavy security pressure on his family, and an absence of judicial transparency. These protests erupted across Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini in morality-police custody.
This young man, born in the 2000s, is now facing a finalized death sentence—issued through the same repeated pattern used against protesters: fabricating cases, extracting confessions under pressure, and threatening families.
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The incident dates back to September 21, 2022, when during protests in the Abkuh neighborhood of Mashhad, a security officer named Rasoul Doust-Mohammadi was killed. Only forty-eight hours later, the governor of Mashhad announced that “the assailant has been arrested,” but no name, photo, or details of the detained person were released.
This media silence continued for nearly two years until November 17, 2024, when the state-run Khorasan newspaper suddenly headlined: “The killer of Rasoul Doust-Mohammadi has been sentenced to death.” For the first time, the initials “M.H. Soleimani” appeared in the report—later confirmed to be Mohammad-Mehdi Soleimani. Khorasan is a major state-run daily based in Mashhad and aligned with Iran’s regime.
According to that same report, Branch Five of the Criminal Court One of Razavi Khorasan Province, presided over by Judge Mohammad Shoja‘pour-Fadaki, sentenced him to qesas (retribution in kind, meaning execution). In addition, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and seventy-four lashes on the charge of “possessing incendiary materials.”
Lack of legal representation, lack of family access, and ambiguities in the judicial process
Available information shows that it is still unknown whether Mohammad-Mehdi Soleimani had access to an independent lawyer during interrogation and trial. No official details have been released about the judicial process, how the accusations were proven, or what evidence the court used.
His family has also been placed under intense security pressure and barred from giving statements, publishing photos, or even revealing his exact age. Local sources say the family was warned that “if the case is publicized, the situation will get worse”—a threat that has become a consistent tactic in protest-related cases in recent years.
Accounts from cellmates: a claim of finding a knife, not committing a murder
One former cellmate has said that Mohammad-Mehdi Soleimani claimed at the time of his arrest that he had “found a bloody knife on the street,” which led to his detention. No official explanation has been given regarding this claim, any forensic matching of the knife to the scene, or any medical examiner’s reports.
These accounts, combined with the lack of transparency, further reinforce the likelihood of coerced confessions obtained under pressure, torture, or threats.
According to numerous reports from prisons under Iran’s dictatorial system, many confessions attributed to protesters are not obtained under fair conditions but through physical and psychological torture, threats, long solitary confinement, and pressure on families. In similar cases in recent years, prisoners have explained after their release that interrogators forced them to accept accusations with statements such as “If you don’t cooperate, we will arrest your family” or “If you don’t confirm what we say, you will be sentenced to death.”
Threatening families and the cycle of covert executions
One of the most alarming aspects of such cases is the intimidation of families into silence. Many families of protest-related detainees have said:
“They told us that if you publicize the case, it will get worse for your child.”
These pressures allow cases to proceed secretly, without public oversight and without adequate defense. This secrecy paves the way for nighttime executions carried out without prior public notice—as seen in multiple previous cases such as Mohammad-Mehdi Karami, Majidreza Rahnavard, and Mohsen Shekari, all young protesters executed following the 2022 uprising.
This case is yet another example of the dozens of similar sentences issued within Iran’s closed judicial and security apparatus—without the possibility of full defense and without independent oversight. It is a case that could at any moment turn into another covert execution unless public opinion and human-rights organizations intervene to expose the truth and halt the implementation of the sentence.
