Iran executes dissident journalist Rouhollah Zam

8 min readDec 12, 2020

Dissident Iranian journalist Rouhollah Zam was hanged in Iran on Saturday morning, according to state television IRIB.

Zam was found guilty of “corruption on earth,” a charge that does not specify a crime but is sometimes used by the Iranian government for alleged attempts to overthrow it.

Zam ran the online opposition news site Amad News, which was accused by Tehran of inciting violence during deadly protests in 2017 and 2018, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported in 2019.

Reporters Without Borders said Saturday it was “outraged at this new crime of Iranian justice.” The group had been campaigning for Zam’s death sentence to be overturned, alleging he was “illegally kidnapped and arrested” and “tried in a grossly unfair manner.”

Zam had been living in exile in France when he was arrested by Iranian authorities in October 2019. The circumstances of how and where he was detained remain unclear. The journalist left France on October 11, according to the French foreign ministry. Three days later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a statement saying it had detained him.

Following his arrest, Iranian authorities released a video of Zam in a car, wearing black-out goggles. The video also shows him sitting in front of a camera, making an “apology” for his actions.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death in June.

The European Union condemned the execution, calling on Iran to “refrain from any future executions and to pursue a consistent policy towards the abolition of the death penalty.”

“It is also imperative for the Iranian authorities to uphold the due process rights of accused individuals and to cease the practice of using televised confessions to establish and promote their guilt,” the spokesperson for the EU’s External Action Service said in a statement on Saturday. “The EU believes that the death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment, which fails to act as a deterrent to crime and represents an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity,” the statement added.

Iran had accused Zam of working with US, French and Israeli intelligence that provided him with “overt and covert” protection, according to Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.

Reporters Without Borders says Iran has been one of the world’s most repressive countries for journalists for 40 years. The group says at least 860 journalists and citizen-journalists have been imprisoned or executed in Iran since 1979.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran on Saturday executed an exiled journalist over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017, a little more than a year after authorities tricked him into traveling to Iraq where he was abducted.

Ruhollah Zam, 47, was one of several opposition figures successfully seized by Iranian intelligence operatives abroad in recent months as Tehran struggles under the weight of U.S. sanctions.

Kidnapping and executing Zam, who lived in Paris under what Iran described as French government protection, likely will further chill an already-scattered Iranian opposition across the West. It also comes as Iran tries to pressure France and other European nations over the collapsed atomic accord in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration.

The execution drew immediate international condemnation.

Zam’s “execution is a deadly blow to freedom of expression in Iran and shows the extent of the Iranian authorities’ brutal tactics to instill fear and deter dissent,” warned Diana Eltahawy of Amnesty International.

Iranian state television referred to Zam as “the leader of the riots” in announcing his execution by hanging early Saturday. In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of “corruption on Earth,” a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran’s government.

Zam’s website AmadNews and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the 2017 protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

Those demonstrations, which began at the end of December 2017 and continued into 2018, represented the biggest challenge to Iran’s rulers since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar mass unrest in November of last year.

The initial spark for the 2017 protests was a sudden jump in food prices. Many believe that hard-line opponents of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani instigated the first demonstrations in the conservative city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, trying to direct public anger at the president. But as protests spread from town to town, the backlash turned against the entire ruling class.

Soon, cries directly challenging Rouhani and even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be heard in online videos shared by Zam.

Telegram shut down the channel over Iranian government complaints it spread information about how to make gasoline bombs. The channel later continued under a different name. Zam denied inciting violence on Telegram at the time.

The 2017 protests reportedly saw some 5,000 people detained and 25 killed.

Zam himself had fled Iran after the 2009 protests, heading first to Malaysia and then to France. While Iranian authorities have never described how Iran’s Revolutionary Guard detained him, Amnesty said he was seized on a trip to neighboring Iraq — where the Guard has wielded deep influence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Zam’s father, the reformist Shiite cleric Mohammad Ali Zam, seemed to confirm the Iraqi abduction in comments on Instagram on Saturday.

“I made a deal with God, I have no worries, these people brought me to Karbala, but did not allow me to visit the shrine,” the Instagram post quotes the younger Zam as saying. Karbala is home to the shrine of Imam Hussein, an important pilgrimage point for Shiites.

The post added: “I told him, ‘Don’t worry, Imam Hussein is in all visitors’ hearts, he is with you.’”

The cleric said he only was allowed to visit Tehran’s Evin prison on Friday to see his son after agreeing with authorities not to tell him his execution loomed. Iranian media did not acknowledge the post.

France previously has criticized his death sentence as “a serious blow to freedom of expression and press freedom in Iran.” Reporters Without Borders, a group that campaigns for press freedoms, said Zam’s hanging was a “new crime of Iranian justice.”

Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists said Zam’s execution had seen “Iranian authorities join the company of criminal gangs and violent extremists who silence journalists by murdering them.”

“This is a monstrous and shameful act, and one which the international community must not let pass unnoticed,” Mansour said.

Iran is one of the world’s top executioners. The European Union called on Iran to stop its executions and “cease the practice of using televised confessions to establish and promote their guilt.” Zam has been the subject of several state TV programs in which he gave apparently coerced confessions.

Zam is one of three opposition figures apparently detained in intelligence operations abroad. In late July, a California-based member of an Iranian militant opposition group in exile was abducted by Iran while staying in Dubai, his family has said.

Iran also is believed to have seized the former head of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, a militant separatist group, while he was in Turkey. Iran has accused Farajollah Cha’ab of being behind a 2018 attack on a military parade that killed at least 25 people and wounded 70.

Iran said on Tuesday its Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence of Zam, who was captured in 2019 after years of living in exile in France. His Amadnews feed had more than one million followers.

State TV said Zam, “director of the counter-revolutionary Amadnews network, was hanged this morning”.

France and human rights groups had condemned the Supreme Court’s decision.

Press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned the execution.

“RSF is outraged at this new crime of Iranian justice and sees (Supreme Leader Ayatollah) @ali_khamenei as the mastermind of this execution,” the group tweeted.

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 right group sais 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 trapped 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 last week that Zam was detained by Guards agents after he travelled to Iraq in September 2019 and brought to Iran.

Iranian officials have accused the United States as well as Tehran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia and government opponents living in exile of stoking the unrest, which began in late 2017 as regional protests over economic hardship spread nationwide.

Officials said 21 people were killed during the unrest and thousands were arrested. The unrest was among the worst Iran has seen in decades, and was followed by even deadlier protests last year against fuel price rises.

Zam’s Amadnews feed was suspended by messaging service Telegram in 2018 for allegedly inciting violence but later reappeared under another name.

Iran executes dissident journalist Rouhollah Zam

Written by purno borno