Whose Motherhood Is This Crime Against? After the Noose… They Stole the Body Too

In a moment that lays bare the brutality of Iran’s ruling theocracy in its starkest form, the voice of the mother of “Vahid Bani Amerian” has said what no statement or report can fully convey: “You took my son from me… and now you won’t even leave his body.” Her words expose a second layer of the crime—beyond the execution itself—where the state turns a dead body into a hostage and denies a mother the most basic human right: to grieve, to bury, to say goodbye.

Last week, authorities executed Vahid Bani Amerian along with five of his fellow MEK prisoners, in an act that has triggered shock and outrage among Iranians inside and outside the country. The timing is not incidental. At a moment of war, instability, and deep political uncertainty, the regime has again resorted to the gallows as a governing tool—an instrument of intimidation aimed at the streets, not a legal outcome aimed at justice. The official narrative speaks of “judicial rulings,” but the pattern is familiar: silence, secrecy, and a methodical attempt to crush society through fear.

“I screamed for 114 weeks: ‘Don’t kill him’… but you killed him,” the mother says. This is not merely a lament. It is testimony to a long struggle waged by families of political prisoners—alongside voices inside prisons and outside—against executions used as state policy. In Iran, the noose is not a punishment for a single person; it is a message to an entire population: dissent will be paid for in blood. And in recent weeks, that message has been amplified through accelerated executions and harsher sentences, as if the regime is trying to freeze a society that is already on the brink.

But the crime did not end with the hanging. The authorities have reportedly refused to hand over Vahid’s body to his mother. They have withheld basic information about where and how he was buried, intensifying fears of secret burial and deliberate disappearance of evidence. Here, the cruelty multiplies: the mother is not only forced to endure the loss of her sons, she is forced to endure the state’s attempt to erase his trace and shut the door on mourning by force. The body itself becomes part of the regime’s machinery of deterrence.

This is not a minor detail. Denying families the bodies of executed prisoners is an extension of punishment beyond prison walls—collective psychological torture. It is often paired with threats to prevent memorial gatherings, to stop grieving from becoming solidarity, and to keep funerals from turning into protests. That is why the mother’s question—“Do I have to scream too: ‘Give me his body?” is directed at a whole system that kills, then tries to forbid even tears.

The growing demonstrations abroad against executions matter because they break the regime’s preferred conditions: darkness, isolation, and international indifference. They force the story into public view and raise the political cost of repression. But the responsibility cannot rest on grieving families alone. International human rights bodies and governments must demand an immediate halt to executions, transparency on the whereabouts of bodies, and the unconditional return of Vahid’s remains to his mother—along with accountability for those who turned death, and even the dead, into tools of terror.

She ends with words that carry both grief and defiance: “Shame on you… we will not forgive you.” In that sentence lies what the regime fears most: executions do not extinguish memory. And when a state steals even a mother’s right to bury her child, it does not end resistance, it deepens it.