Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi were both hanged in a prison after spending six years on death row for the charge of sodomy in Iran late last week.

Via unilad.co.uk

“Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi were both hanged in a prison in the northwestern city of Maragheh, around 310 miles away from Tehran, having been sentenced to death for ‘forced sexual intercourse between two men’. As per the Human Dignity Trust, Article 236 also provides that ‘tafkhiz’ – defined under Article 235 as ‘putting a male sex organ between the thighs/buttocks of another man’ – is punishable with 100 lashes, or the death penalty if the active party is non-Muslim and the passive party is Muslim. For women, it’s punishable with 100 lashes.”

Peter Tatchell, an longtime gay activist, told The Jerusalem Post, ‘Iran is one of a dozen Muslim-majority countries and regions that enforce Sharia law and impose the death penalty for homosexuality. The execution of these men follows a long-standing regime policy of the state-sanctioned murder of gay men, often on disputed charges after unfair trials that have been condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. 

In February 2021, an Iranian cleric Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian claimed that the Covid-19 vaccine turns people gay, on messaging platform Telegram, to almost 210,000 followers.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Tabrizian wrote on the platform: ‘Don’t go near those who have had the COVID vaccine. They have become homosexuals.’

It is believed that between 4,000 and 6,000 gay men and women have been executed in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. 

Iranian American journalist Karmel Melamed in a tweet called for ‘outrage’ from the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.