PARIS: Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders voiced “outrage” Saturday at the execution in Iran of Ruhollah Zam, a former opposition figure who had been implicated in anti-government protests.
The organisation, known by its French acronym RSF, said it had warned UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet and Javaid Rehman, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, since Oct 23 about Zam’s “possible execution”.
Iranian state television said earlier Saturday that the “counter-revolutionary” Zam had been hanged after the supreme court upheld his sentence due to “the severity of the crimes” committed against the Islamic republic.
“RSF is outraged at this new crime of Iranian justice,” the organisation tweeted.
It charged that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was “the mastermind of this execution”.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced the arrest of Zam in October 2019, claiming he had been “directed by France’s intelligence service”.
State television said he was “under the protection of several countries’ intelligence services”.
London-based rights group Amnesty International, in a statement after his verdict was confirmed, had described Zam as a “journalist and dissident”.
It said the confirmation marked “a shocking escalation in the use of the death penalty as a weapon of repression”.