As Christmas Nears, Iranian Boxing Champion’s Execution Feared
Prison officials have transferred a boxing champion-turned-political prisoner sentenced to death to solitary confinement, raising concerns among activists that his execution could be imminent.
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As people around the world prepare to celebrate Christmas and the holiday season, an Iranian boxing champion is believed to be at imminent risk of execution after authorities rejected his request for a retrial.
Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani was arrested in 2020 for taking part in nationwide democracy protests in 2019 and accused of supporting an opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). The 30-year-old was convicted of “corruption on Earth” and sentenced to death for a third time in September 2024 after “a grossly unfair trial”, according to Amnesty International. The supreme court upheld his death sentence on 4 October.
Furthermore, Vafaei Sani was informed last week that his request for a retrial has been rejected by Iran’s Supreme Court. His mother was also granted a visit to her son—a common occurence for convicts on the brink of execution.
“His life is now in grave danger,” the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s political arm said in a statement.
Iran’s Islamic leadership has a long history of executing athletes who dared to oppose the regime, including Habib Khabiri, captain of the national football team, in 1984, and Fourouzan Abdi, captain of the national women’s volleyball team, in 1988.. In September 2020, Iran executed Navid Afkari, an Iranian wrestler who confessed to crimes allegedly under torture that included participating in the 2018 anti-regime demonstrations.
Afkari and his brother were arrested in September 2018 on dozens of charges that include insulting Iran’s supreme leader, robbery, “enmity against God,” and murder. Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a death sentence by a criminal court in Shiraz against Navid and a 25-year prison sentence for Vahid for assisting in the alleged murder, despite evidence that they were tortured into confessing.
The case drew international attention and widespread condemnation from nation states and sports leagues alike. International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach said he is “extremely concerned” about the case, and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) requested that “the life of sportsman Navid Afkari will be spared.” UFC President Dana White even called on U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene to save Afkari’s life.
Amin Bazrgar, another Iranian wrestler, went missing in August 2021, a day after he took to Instagram to protest the September 2020 execution of Afkari. Then in 2023, Iran executed a karate champion who was charged with killing a soldier during the nationwide protests triggered following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini. The 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman was detained and tortured by Iran’s morality police for allegedly showing too much hair beneath her compulsory veil. She died in custody, triggering Iran’s longest anti-government protests since the 1979 revolution that transformed the country into an Islamic theocracy.
Mohammad Mehdi Karami—a Kurdish-Iranian karate champion—was among the protestors who took the streets. He later was arrested and charged with murder in a sham trial that was condemned by human rights organizations, as well as the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
There are others like Afkari and Karami. Ali Mozaffari, a professional volleyball player, was shot and killed by security forces during the 2022 protests. Mohammad Ghaemi Far, the goalkeeper for an under-21 soccer club in Dezful, Khuzestan province, was cornered in a dead-end alley on October 22, 2022 during a street protest and shot in the back of the head. National bodybuilding champion Ehsan Ghasemifar was killed by security forces during the protests. Others, like footballer Amir Reza Nasr-Azadani was sentenced to 26 years in prison on the charge of “waging war” on the Iranian state by participating in the Amini protests.
It wouldn’t be the first time Iran’s regime has weaponized sports and athletes. For example, Iran’s martial arts federations are involved in training the regime’s brutal security forces. Several members of the Fatehin (Conquerors) Special Unit—an all-volunteer militia attached to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—are currently positioned within Iran’s martial arts federations. The unit is regularly deployed to quell protests and suppress unrest in Iran.
The vice president of Iran’s kick-jitsu committee, Mohammad Yaran, is a senior members of the Fatehin Special Unit and has been regularly pictured alongside the unit’s commander. Iran’s Judo Federation appointed Hassan Kordmihan—a militant cleric who was the alleged mastermind behind the 2016 attack on the Saudi mission in Tehran—as the head of the federation’s cultural committee in 2020. He also serves as an adviser to the federation’s president.
Kordmihan runs his own judo club called Ali Heydar, which is reportedly used as a recruitment centre for the Fatehin Special Unit in southern Tehran. Furthermore, a former bodyguard and close confidant of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was named the president of the country’s National Olympic Committee.
In November, the World Boxing Council (WBC) condemned Vafaei Sani’s death sentence, with its president Mauricio Sulaiman Saldivar saying it would be an attack on the “fundamental values of sport and human dignity”. More than 20 Olympic medallists, coaches and other international athletes, including the former captain of the Australian football team Craig Foster and Bahram Mavaddat, a footballer who was in the Iranian squad for the 1978 World Cup, also signed a letter calling for a halt his execution.
“The world must not stand by while Iran silences its champions.”
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