A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
U.S. and Iranian officials have ended another round of negotiations without an agreement on Iran's nuclear program. With a fleet of U.S. warships and aircraft still parked in the Middle East, Iran has continued its crackdown on those who took part in anti-government protests last month. Human rights groups say that government forces killed thousands of people in those protests and tens of thousands have been arrested. Some of those protesters face the death penalty. Durrie Bouscaren reports.
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UNIDENTIFIED JUDGE: (Speaking Farsi).
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: In this video, which aired on a state-run broadcaster in Iran, 18-year-old Ehsan Hosseinipour Hessarlou stands in a courtroom wearing a blue-striped prison jumpsuit.
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UNIDENTIFIED JUDGE: (Speaking Farsi).
BOUSCAREN: "How many Molotov cocktails did you have?" the judge asks.
EHSAN HOSSEINIPOUR HESSARLOU: (Speaking Farsi).
BOUSCAREN: Hosseinipour Hessarlou says he had two, that he threw them inside a mosque during the protests. Activists say these confessions are forced and should not be considered true. They say reports of torture and threats against family members to extract confessions are well-documented and widespread in Iran's prison system.
MAHMOOD AMIRY-MOGHADDAM: All of them are sentenced based on forced confessions.
BOUSCAREN: Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam is the director of Iran Human Rights, an organization based in Norway. They identified at least 26 protesters who have been sentenced to death in recent weeks. And they fear hundreds more are at risk of execution.
AMIRY-MOGHADDAM: What we think is that, most probably, the actual number of those who have already received the sentence is much higher, given the limitations we have in gathering this kind of information.
BOUSCAREN: Amiry-Moghaddam's organization has highlighted Ehsan Hosseinipour Hessarlou's case in particular. The 18-year-old is one of three teenagers accused of setting a fire in a mosque on January 8 near Tehran. Two members of the paramilitary forces were allegedly killed in the blaze. Hosseinipour Hessarlou's family's attorney says he's innocent, that he was arrested 2 hours before the fire. And he doesn't even appear in CCTV footage released as evidence, they say. Amiry-Moghaddam says, as far as he knows, none of the death sentences announced publicly have been carried out yet, but the clock is ticking.
AMIRY-MOGHADDAM: We are concerned that some of these people will be executed in the coming days and weeks.
BOUSCAREN: Capital punishment is used in Iran. And in recent weeks, the government has hung people previously convicted of drug offenses. In an interview with CBS News in January, Trump was questioned on his promise to intervene if Iran killed protesters.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will take very strong action if they do such a thing, we will take very strong action.
BOUSCAREN: The United States has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the region. Trump has threatened to attack if nuclear talks fail. But within Iran, Amiry-Moghaddam says that airing these trials and publicly announcing these executions is a way to tamp down dissent in the meantime.
AMIRY-MOGHADDAM: As we have seen in these protests, the aim has been to terrorize the whole society, to kill as many as possible and to set an example so that people don't come out again.
BOUSCAREN: But this week, large crowds of students at three separate universities took to the streets defying the harshest crackdown on protesters in a generation.
For NPR News, I'm Durrie Bouscaren, Istanbul.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAM PREKOP'S "A CLOUD TO THE BACK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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