December 25 2020
Iranian dissident Ruhollah Zam, convicted of fomenting violence during anti-government protests in 2017, was hanged December 12, state television reported.
Zam, 47, was the first of three expatriate dissidents lured away from their exile homes to countries where Iran was able to kidnap them and bring them back to Iran. The other two have not yet been tried.
Zam was captured in 2019 in Baghdad after years of living in exile in France. His Amadnews feed had more than one million followers.
France and human rights groups had condemned the execution.
Amnesty International said it was “shocked and horrified” by Iran’s action. “We call on the international community, including member states of the UN Human Rights Council and the EU, to take immediate action to pressure the Iranian authorities to halt their escalating use of the death penalty as a weapon of political repression,” the rights group said in a statement.
The son of a pro-reform Shi’ite cleric, Zam fled Iran and was given asylum in France.
In October 2019, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said it had caught Zam in a “complex operation using intelligence deception.” It did not say where the operation took place.
Nour News, a news agency close to the Revolutionary Guards, said Zam was detained by Pasdar agents after he traveled to Iraq in September 2019 and then forcibly brought him to Iran.
According to Zam’s family, Zam flew to Baghdad to pick up a contribution allegedly from Ayatollah Sistani to help him set up a television channel. But that turned out just to be a lure.
Zam’s Amadnews feed was suspended by messaging service Telegram in 2018 for allegedly inciting violence by broadcasting instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. It later reappeared under another name. When Iran asked Telegram to suspend it again, Telegram refused to do because the new outlet was not promoting violence.
Amad News was founded in 2015 by several people, including Zam, the son of Mohammad-Ali Zam, an official of the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and 1990s. The younger Zam’s wife and lawyer had hoped the father could win clemency for his son.
The lawyer, Hassan Fereshtyan, told IranWire that he had told his client in no uncertain terms not to fly to Baghdad, saying, “You’ll never come back.” He described Zam as “courageous, ambitious, at times naive, and full of that fiery youthfulness.”
Zam was the first of three exiled dissidents lured to the Middle East and kidnaped by the Islamic Republic. After Zam’s October 2019 kidnaping, Jam-shid Sharmahd, 65, was lured to Dubai and then spirited to Iran July 28. Sharmahd is an Austrian dual national but lived in California where he was a leader of the Kingdom Assembly of Iran. Iran accused him of running its Tondar military arm. His family denied that. Then, on October 15, Habib Asyud, 47, a dual national of Sweden, was lured to Turkey. He is the past chief of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz.