An Iranian court has sentenced a dissident rapper to death, local media reported Wednesday. The rapper has been jailed for more than a year and a half for supporting protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini.
“Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court… sentenced Toomaj Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth,” the artist’s lawyer Amir Raisian said, according to the reformist Shargh newspaper.
Salehi, 33, was arrested in October 2022 after publicly backing the wave of demonstrations which erupted a month earlier, triggered by the death in custody of 22-year-old Amini, an Iranian Kurd who had been detained over an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s strict dress rules for women. Months of unrest following Amini’s death in September 2022 saw hundreds of people killed including dozens of security personnel, and thousands more arrested. Iranian officials labelled the protests “riots” and accused Tehran’s foreign foes of fomenting the unrest.
The Revolutionary Court had accused Salehi of “assistance in sedition, assembly and collusion, propaganda against the system and calling for riots,” Raisian said.
The nation’s Supreme Court had reviewed the case and issued a ruling to the lower court to “remove the flaws in the sentence,” Raisian said. However, the court had “in an unprecedented move, emphasised its independence and did not implement the Supreme Court’s ruling,” according to Raisian.
Raisian said that he and Salehi “will certainly appeal against the sentence.”
“The fact is that the verdict of the court has clear legal conflicts,” the lawyer was quoted as saying. “The contradiction with the ruling of the Supreme Court is considered the most important and at the same time the strangest part of this ruling.”
Nine men have been executed in protest-related cases involving killing and other violence against security forces.