Human rights groups charge Ahamdinejad regime has used death penalty excessively

The Global Post

The first time Siamak, a private sector employee who participated in Iran’s post-election protests, witnessed a killing was last June, one day after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned demonstrators he was escalating the government’s repression of street protests.
Siamak was out on the streets of downtown Tehran where groups of protesters seeking to link up with each other pelted the security forces with stones. Then, gunshots rang out.
'The first bullet hit an iron door and made a huge sound, the other got a guy near me on his arm, and the third one hit a middle-aged man in the chest and dropped him to the ground,” Siamak recollected as he sipped tea in an Istanbul cafe. He fled the country after several of his friends were arrested in Tehran in February.
"No one moved for three or four seconds," Siamak said, remembering the shocked silence that temporarily blanketed police and protesters. “We didn’t even run"…
Human rights campaigners are calling these and other incidents “murder” and they are charging that Iran's rate of state executions is much too high. Iran refuses to allow independent human rights monitors to visit the country.
"It’s murder, even under Iranian law,” said Renee Redman, the executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC) which recently published a report on post-election abuses. “They’re breaking their own laws, using excessive force against largely peaceful demonstrators"…
Total executions in the Persian year, which started on March 21, 2009, passed 440 according to the Mojahedeen-e Khalq (MKO) organization, a Paris-based opposition group whose tally is based on executions reported by state-run media…
"The true number for executions is much higher as this does not cover the secret executions and the ones not reported by the media or people killed in streets by suppressive forces,” said Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for MKO. “In the past, the clerical regime has executed many political prisoners as ordinary criminals and drug traffickers".
Since Ahamdinejad’s controversial June re-election, beatings, shootings, mock executions, torture and rape have been increasingly documented both inside the Islamic Republic’s jails and in public.
"We’re seeing the regime use executions as a threat by making them very visible, said IHRDC’s Redman, who pointed out that although no one has been executed yet for participating in demonstrations, the regime’s heightened executions of what it describes as “drug smugglers” is suspicious.
"Even if the victims were all convicted of drug trafficking, that is not serious enough a crime under international law to warrant the death penalty"…
"These are men who will speak out when they are released,” said an exiled Iranian prison supervisor who requested anonymity for discussing the advice he would offer interrogators questioning dissidents in jails operated by Iran’s SaVaMa security organization. “So they must either be struck in such a way that it won’t show, or they must not leave the prison alive".
The Islamic Republic cracked down on the protests by arresting an estimated 5,000 people, several hundreds of whom were subjected to televised trials and issued with sentences ranging from internal exile to capital punishment. Human rights monitors doubt that all the estimated 200 people executed since the summer elections were guilty of the crimes of which they were convicted, such as drug-smuggling or seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Iran has continued to defy the international community’s condemnation of its human rights abuses record, most recently before the Human Rights Council in Geneva