A mother in Iran has been sentenced to death for taking a photograph of a shop on fire during protests in January. Leila Abolhasani, aged around 43, was arrested on January 8 after she photographed a burning store in the city of Shahinshahr in Iran’s central Isfahan province.
The shop was Ofogh Koorosh, a major chain of discount supermarkets. A source told IranWire that Ms Abolhasani had been accused of arson and has spent the last seven months locked up at Dowlatabad Prison.
Death sentence handed down
In late May, the mother-of-two was sentenced to death by Vahid Hemmatnejad, a presiding judge at the Isfahan Revolutionary Court. The charge was ‘Moharebeh’, a crime loosely translated as ‘waging war against God’.
Her case is now being reviewed by Iran’s Supreme Court after she appealed the verdict. An anonymous refugee told Newsnation that Ms Abolhasani’s footage could have shown how ‘brutal and savage’ Iran’s regime is.
Warnings of fear and intimidation
They said: ‘They want her case to serve as a lesson to anyone who tries to speak the truth about the regime. ‘They want to create fear among the people so that anyone who might consider revealing the truth will be too afraid to do so, especially after seeing what has happened to her and her two children.’
Human rights groups estimate as many as 30,000 people, including several hundred children, were killed in the anti-government protests in January. Iran is one of the world’s largest practitioners of capital punishment, with more than 1,600 people executed in the country in 2025 alone – the highest figure recorded since 1985.
Executions without due process
Many of the sentences, mostly carried out as hangings, were handed out without ‘due process’, human rights charities say. In April Iran said it had hanged Erfan Kiani for vandalism and violence during January’s protests.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency said Kiani was a ‘hired thug of Mossad’ working for Israeli intelligence and had engaged in terror in the city of Isfahan, including holding a machete. In a statement, the UN said it condemned the executions and use of the death penalty.
