Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi receives death penalty for supporting protests

NOS News•today, 5:39 PM

Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death for his role in the anti-government protests in 2022, his lawyer told the Iranian newspaper Sharq.

Salehi was arrested in October 2022 because he expressed support for the protest movement in his music. The death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini sparked months of protests against which the regime cracked down. The woman died after being violently arrested for allegedly wearing her headscarf too loosely.

The rapper was sentenced to six years in prison last year, and then avoided the death penalty at the hands of the Supreme Court. According to the lawyer, a revolutionary court in Isfahan has now ruled that Salehi will still receive the death penalty. According to the counsel, this judgment is contrary to the judgment of the court. “We will certainly appeal this ruling,” he says.

German parliamentarian Ye-One Rhie (Member of the Bundestag for the SPD) also reports the verdict. She is Toomaj’s political sponsor, which means she keeps his case in the spotlight and increases the pressure.

“It is still completely unclear how this verdict came about,” she writes on X.

Salehi was briefly released at the end of last year. In a video he then talked about torture in the cell. His arms and legs would have been broken. He also had to spend 252 days in solitary confinement.

For two weeks now, the Iranian police have enforced the headscarf requirement for women more strictly. Videos are posted on social media showing police cracking down on women who do not adhere to the dress code.