“A junior national-team wrestler, hanged at nineteen.”
- Age
- 19
- Sport
- Freestyle wrestling, junior national team
- Honours
- Bronze medal, 2024 Sayitiev Cup
- Executed
- 19 March 2026, with two co-defendants
- Reported
- Iran International, 19 March 2026
Who was Saleh Mohammadi?
Saleh Mohammadi was nineteen, a freestyle wrestler on Iran’s junior national team and a bronze medallist at the 2024 Sayitiev Cup. Wrestling is the country’s national sport and its athletes are state assets; that is exactly why executing one carries a message.
He was hanged on 19 March 2026 with two other men. Olympic champions and international wrestling figures described the execution as a human catastrophe and called for Iran’s suspension from international competition — the same demand raised in 2020 after the execution of Navid Afkari, a wrestler from Shiraz whose case Saleh Mohammadi’s so closely resembles.
How the Islamic Republic executes protesters
Protest executions in Iran follow a fixed sequence: arrest during or shortly after a demonstration; weeks of incommunicado detention; a confession broadcast on state television; a Revolutionary Court hearing lasting hours rather than days, usually without counsel of the defendant’s choosing; a moharebeh or efsad-fel-arz conviction; a rejected appeal; and a dawn hanging announced afterwards by the judiciary’s own news agency.
None of that survives contact with the fair-trial guarantees of Article 14 of the ICCPR, which Iran ratified in 1975. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran and the UN Fact-Finding Mission have both concluded that executions arising from protest cases amount to arbitrary deprivation of life, and that when carried out as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians they constitute crimes against humanity. Saleh Mohammadi’s case followed the sequence exactly.
Video and archive
No verified video of Saleh Mohammadi is in the public record that this project can confirm. The film below documents the events in which he was killed, and the Javidnaman archive holds the family photographs and case notes for the January 2026 dead.
Iranian revolutionary justice: how the Islamic Republic executes. More documentary footage is collected on the videos page.
Sources
- Iran International, 19 March 2026
- Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO)
- HRANA — Human Rights Activists News Agency
- Sources and methodology on this site
Why this page exists
Names surface for a few days and then disappear under the next news cycle. This page keeps a dated, citation-ready record of what is known about Saleh Mohammadi, with the photograph his family chose to release and links to the monitors who verify such cases. Corrections and additional documentation are welcome through the organisations listed under sources and methodology.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Saleh Mohammadi?
Saleh Mohammadi, 19, a junior national-team freestyle wrestler and 2024 Sayitiev Cup bronze medallist, was executed on 19 March 2026 alongside two others. Olympic champions called the hanging a human catastrophe.
When was Saleh Mohammadi executed?
Saleh Mohammadi was executed on 19 March 2026.
What was Saleh Mohammadi charged with?
Protest executions in Iran are almost always brought under moharebeh ("waging war against God") or efsad-fel-arz ("corruption on earth"), capital charges decided by Revolutionary Courts in closed sessions that fall far short of the fair-trial standards of Article 14 of the ICCPR.
Are protest executions in Iran lawful?
No. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran and the UN Fact-Finding Mission have found that death sentences imposed after coerced confessions and closed proceedings amount to arbitrary deprivation of life, and that the practice, applied systematically against protesters, can constitute a crime against humanity.
Related pages
- Navid Afkari — another biography from the same period.
- The Two Nights — 8–9 January 2026 in detail.
- The protest record · Faces · Victims database
- All memorial biographies · In Memoriam
