The inhuman punishment against 37-year-old prisoner Mohsen Ashiri underscores the regime’s use of cruelty and intimidation amid rampant corruption among officials.
The Iranian regime has once again carried out one of its most inhumane punishments — the amputation of a prisoner’s fingers — despite the victim’s full consent to forgive.
According to reports, on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, the authorities at Isfahan Central Prison (Dastgerd) amputated four fingers from the right hand of Mohsen Ashiri, a 37-year-old man from Zazeran, living in Isfahan.
Ashiri was arrested six years ago on charges of theft and sentenced by an Isfahan criminal court to six months in prison and the amputation of four fingers of his right hand. After serving his prison term, he was released on bail of one billion tomans following the plaintiff’s consent to forgive.
However, in September 2025, the Judiciary of the ruling clerics summoned him again and demanded that his bail be increased to an impossible 200 billion tomans, warning that failure to pay would result in the execution of the amputation sentence. Unable to provide the demanded sum, Ashiri was re-arrested and returned to Dastgerd Prison. Within less than a month, the barbaric sentence was carried out.
This punishment was implemented despite the plaintiff’s explicit consent and Ashiri’s signed declaration of repentance, showing the regime’s determination to use brutality as a tool of repression.
Observers note the deep hypocrisy of the clerical authorities, who continue to enforce such medieval punishments on impoverished citizens while systemic corruption and billion-dollar embezzlements by regime insiders are routinely exposed in Iranian media.
The execution of this sentence follows a similar incident on June 10, 2025, when the fingers of two other prisoners were amputated in the same prison under orders of the regime’s Judiciary.
Amnesty International condemned those acts, describing such punishments as a clear case of state-sanctioned torture and a flagrant violation of human dignity.
In a statement on July 31, Amnesty wrote: “Responding to the Iranian authorities’ use of a guillotine machine to amputate the fingers of three men in Urumieh Central Prison on 30 July as corporal punishment imposed after a grossly unfair, torture-tainted trial, Hussein Baoumi, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said:
‘The amputations carried out on Hadi Rostami, Mehdi Sharafian and Mehdi Shahivand are a stark reminder of Iran’s prolific use of corporal punishment and the inhumanity of a justice system that legalizes brutality. Amputation constitutes torture, which is a crime under international law, and is a flagrant and abhorrent assault on human dignity. For six years, these men lived in a waking nightmare, knowing the authorities could at any moment irreversibly mutilate their bodies with a judicial seal.'”
Human rights defenders say that the clerical regime’s use of amputations and other cruel punishments serves not justice, but the purpose of instilling fear and crushing the conscience of a suffering nation.
