Iran executes a Jewish citizen convicted of murder following a dispute over money

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran on Monday executed a Jewish citizen convicted of murdering another man in 2022 following a personal dispute, reports said. It was a rare case of an execution of member of a religious minority in the predominately Muslim nation.

Mizanonline.ir, a website affiliated with Iran's judiciary, said 23-year-old Arvin Ghahremani was put to death after the country’s Supreme Court affirmed the capital punishment handed down in the case earlier last year.

The report quoted Hamid Reza Karimi, the prosecutor of the western city of Kermanshah, as saying the court and the convicted man’s lawyers and relatives had failed to convince the victim’s family to abstain from qisas — an act under Islamic penal code that calls for similar punishment, or an “eye for an eye” — and effectively pardon his killer.

The victim’s name was not provided.

According to the report, Ghahramani attacked the victim outside a gym in Kermanshah in 2022 and stabbed the man several times following a dispute over money he had loaned the victim.

Jewish citizens are a small minority in the country of 85 million. In 1999, Iran arrested 13 Jewish citizens, accusing them of spying for Israel and sentenced several to up to four years in prison.

Many Jews fled the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and current estimates suggest some 20,000 Jews remain in Iran. Shiite Muslims make up most of Iran's population and the establishment is led by hard-line clerics who preach a strict version of Islam.