He Married Her, Then They Hanged Him

Alireza Sepahi married his fiancee by phone from a prison cell, then woke up to find his execution had only been delayed, not cancelled. He was 25.

Alireza Sepahi married his fiancee by phone from a prison cell, then woke up to find his execution had only been delayed, not cancelled. He was 25. He had already survived one heart attack that stopped his hanging in July. This time, on October 5, there was no second chance.

Sepahi was arrested on January 10 after protests in Isfahan’s Alikhani Square two days earlier. Iranian authorities said four police officers died in those clashes. They charged him with membership in an armed rebel group and waging war against God. The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence. He went to Isfahan Central Prison, also called Dastgerd Prison, and waited.

The July reprieve

In late July, Sepahi was scheduled to be executed in public alongside two other men, including his cousin Abolfazl. The other two were hanged on July 19. Sepahi’s turn came on July 28. Then his body gave out before the state could take his life.

He suffered a heart attack before execution and was hospitalized, said Mai Sato, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran. He was discharged a few days later and returned to prison, where he lived every day in fear of execution, until the moment arrived.

That moment arrived at dawn on October 5. Sepahi was executed alongside another man, 21-year-old Alireza Raissi. Both were defendants in what rights groups call the Alikhani Square case. Seven people have now been put to death in that single case, according to Iran Human Rights and other monitors.

The wedding by phone

Here is the part that makes you stop scrolling. Sepahi’s fiancee, Mahshad Kashani, was also arrested over the January protests. She was sentenced to five years in prison. Before his execution, the two were married in a ceremony conducted by telephone from inside the prison. The wedding happened just before his likely death. He avoided execution once. He did not avoid it twice.

I keep thinking about that phone call. Not the legal details. Not the charges. Just a 25-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman saying yes to each other while guards stood nearby, knowing the state had already decided how his story would end. Then the guards took him back to his cell. Then they took him to the gallows.

His mother was arrested alongside him in January. She remains in prison, serving a five-year term. Rights groups say she was tortured in front of her son during detention. Sepahi himself was shot with four shotgun pellets during his arrest at home, according to accounts gathered by Iran International’s fact-finding campaign. He was then tortured in custody, those same sources said.

What we know, and what we do not

The documented facts are narrow. Sepahi was arrested after Iran’s January protests. He avoided public execution in July due to a heart attack. He married his fiancee shortly before his death. He was hanged on October 5 at Isfahan Central Prison.

What remains unknown is whether his retrial request would have changed anything. His lawyer was still seeking a review when the execution was carried out, Sato said. The request was rejected without a hearing, according to HRANA, the news agency of Human Rights Activists in Iran. Defense lawyers cited coerced statements and procedural flaws. We will never know what a fair hearing might have produced.

We also do not know where his body was buried. Sato warned that pressure on the families of executed individuals continues even after the sentence has been carried out. Families are often denied the right to bury their loved ones in their hometowns. They are told not to speak about the death. They are told not to mourn in public.

This is not a story about geopolitics. It is not about sanctions or nuclear deals or regional power. It is about a man who got married knowing he would die, and a state that killed him anyway. The business of running a country includes the business of deciding who lives and who dies. In Iran, that business is conducted in prison yards at dawn, with phone weddings and heart attacks and mothers who stay behind bars.

I do not have a lesson to draw from this. There is no clean takeaway. There is only the fact that Sepahi married his fiancee, then they hanged him, and his mother is still in prison, and nobody outside Iran can do much about it except say the names out loud and refuse to let them disappear into the next news cycle.